Through the absolute dark of the catacombs they came.

Tentative, furtive, but growing bolder, the things crept toward him. There were four, five perhaps. They approached on bare feet whose quiet padding was accompanied with tiny clicks from nails or claws. They whispered to each other in gurgling tones, sounds that seemed to mock language, but unmistakably had meaning.

Zakoji sat with his back against the strangely smooth tiles of the wall, his legs crossed, his hands cupped in his lap. His dark hair, unbound, hung over his eyes. Except for his slow, steady breathing, he was motionless. If the catacomb denizens sensed him somehow through the darkness—and he was sure that they did—they must have thought him sleeping.

In this, they erred. Zakoji was deep in a warrior’s trance. His body rested, but his senses were sharp. He heard their movements in the tomblike stillness, but more than that he felt them. Their cold, clammy life-essence seemed almost to assail him. The closer they came, the more loathsome it was.

Their wariness began to give way. They were almost close enough now to touch him. They had a musty odor like the cast off skin of a snake, but Zakoji sensed that they were vaguely manlike, almost human. Or once human.

They were certainly close enough to touch him now, but they hesitated. He could almost feel them trembling in the darkness. Whether it was from fear, or anticipation, he couldn’t judge. Did they see his sword—the sword of his father and his father’s father—sheathed and lying next to him? If so, did they understand its meaning?

One of them shifted and let out a soft moan. It was going to touch him, or worse. Zakoji didn’t wait to find out. Quicker than the thing’s reaching hand, Zakoji had grasped his sword, pulled it from its sheath, and lashed out at the dark.

The things let out wet squeals of surprise. They were quicker than Zakoji had imagined. They cringed back, and his blade cut only the dank air.

Zakoji leapt to his feet. He assumed the stance that began the sword-form “Willow in the Gale”—the form most masters agreed was best for fighting blind—and braced himself for the things’ attack. He had never thought he would have to put the esoteric dissertations of those scrolls into practice.

The effort was wasted. The things loped back into the darkness, some braying, others hissing, what Zakoji surmised must pass for curses among their kind. Soon their sounds were no louder than the beating of his heart in his ears. Then they were gone all together.

Zakoji reached down and found his scabbard. He sheathed his sword, and then stuck it under his belt sash. He stood alone in the darkness.

Time to move on.

This was the second encounter he had had since entering the catacombs. He had no wish to have a third. The first had cost him his last torch. He had slain a bloated, pale creature the size of a horse he would have sworn was a gigantic grub, if not for its fetid breath and the warmth of the black blood he had cleaned from his blade afterward. The second encounter had only ended his restorative meditation prematurely. It could undoubtedly get worse.

He found the wall with his left hand. The tunnels, more than wide enough for three men to walk abreast, were almost completely circular. The walls were covered in black tiles. They were uncannily smooth under his fingers, almost as if they were oiled. The gaps between them were so tight and uniform they reminded Zakoji of snake scales.

“Keep to the main tunnel. Enter none of the smaller branches,” The monks had told him. “Move as quick as you can. Don’t tarry.” The wisdom of some of their advice had been borne out. The proof of the rest would be seen in time.

He reached into the pouch he carried. He had only one candle left for light. With flint, steel, and the tinder he carried, he lit it with practiced ease despite the darkness. Its glow was yellowed and weak, but it was the center of Zakoji’s world at the moment. At best, the candle wouldn’t last long, but the monks had told him it was only a day’s walk through the tunnel at a good pace. Time was a strange thing in the darkness, but Zakoji would stake his oath that the better part of a day had passed already. He must be near the way out. He had to be.

One hand on the wall to guide him, Zakoji continued his march through the tunnel. He hoped he moved toward the outside world.

He silently cursed the Celestial Minister of Fates and whatever lesser heavenly bureaucrats were the architects of his current predicament. If only events hadn’t forced him to leave the Imperial port of Tseroku with such haste. How the eyes of the Empire had found him he couldn’t say, but they had. Even in the thick, fish-smelling fogs of the northern Imperial frontier, the Empress could make her displeasure known.

The latest assassin was a smirking young noble, Nenuri na Takume Jichiro. He had challenged Zakoji by his old name—the name Zakoji had surrendered when he had betrayed duty and caste. The name of a man the Empress had ordered to commit ritual suicide as the price of disobedience.

This Jichiro was little more than a boy. He was about the same age Zakoji had been when he had knelt and been made a paladin of the young Empress, whose throne name was Precious Star of Dawn. Jichiro wore the imperial heron crest in gold on his surcoat, as well. He too was a paladin; his head was filled with boyish notions of honor and duty.

They had faced each other in the muddy street, Jichiro in his fine silks shielded by an oiled-paper raincoat, his hair fixed in a warrior’s topknot, Zakoji unshaven and in worn clothes, unruly strands of hair plastered to his face by the damp, sea air.

Before their swords were drawn, Zakoji had perceived something else. The Empress had taken the young paladin as a lover. He saw it in Jichiro’s eyes. As the duel was joined, Zakoji fancied he could almost smell her perfume on the swaggering youth—a scent made for her and her alone.

He had felt no jealousy when he killed the paladin, he told himself. The young woman he had known had ceased to be when she had ascended the Jade Dragon Throne. He had no right to question an Empress on what lovers she might take, what lives she might use.

Zakoji had wiped a paladin’s blood from his blade with a piece of rice paper, and pushed the empress from his mind. After he had said a quick prayer for the dead man, he had put his mind to how to get out of Tseroku, and the Empire, as quickly as possible.

The gods had favored him in that, at least—or so he thought at the time. Escape had come in the form of employment as a bodyguard on a Thuleslanic League trading mission led by an ambitious merchant called Bald Hraethno.

Hraethno led them northward across the Frozen Sea on ice-ships sailed on steel runners edged with crystalline adamant. Their destination was a plateau overshadowed by a wind-swept mesa. On and inside that mesa was a relic of a lost age, the lamasery-city of Ghothrune. It was in this forbidding and ill-omened place that Hraethno hoped to make the fortune that would elevate him to the position of syndic, maybe even optimate, in the League.

He now lay dead on a basalt slab in the bowels of Ghothrune. The merchant had taken ill on the ships to the mesa, and the diet of fungi and tubers grown in the grotto-gardens beneath the city had not been enough to keep him from wasting away. In less than ten days after their arrival, Hraethno was dead and Zakoji was without an employer.

It was more than diet, Zakoji was sure. There was something oppressive in the air of Ghothrune, a wrongness. He could feel it in the corpse-pale, blue light given off by the ancient crystal orbs in the corridors, and in the dreamy detachment of its monks and townsfolk. When the yellow veiled and turbaned High Lama had appeared before them and stood in silence while the attendant who spoke for him informed them of Hraethno’s passing, Zakoji had decided he would leave the city and return to the ships.

The other Thuleslani could not be convinced. They were a fatalistic, superstitious people, over-concerned with omens and portents. The death of Hraethno and the oppressive strangeness of Ghothrune had convinced them that their grim gods had marked them. Some began practicing their death-songs; others fingered fetishes and talismans, and prayed.

Better to die in warmth among their fellows than in the ice and snow, where a man’s soul could be forever lost. The Thuleslani were northmen, and they knew all too well the hazards of the blizzard that had howled around the mesa since their arrival. To take the narrow path down from the city now would be certain death.

In this Zakoji agreed. He had another route in mind. They had all noticed the heavy, barred doors in parts of the city, which were often posted with armed guards. When Zakoji had asked a tailor with whom he had done business about them, he was told that these were entrances to the catacombs, tunnels older than the city itself. No one had ventured into the tunnels in a generation, but the tailor averred that one of the tunnels led to the base of the plateau.

“Why are the doors guarded?” Zakoji had asked.

“Ah, that,” the tailor had replied in the languid way of the Ghothrune-folk. “Because there are things in the catacombs best left in the darkness. They emerge sometimes, these monsters…”

Zakoji understood. The doors were not barred to keep the people of Ghothrune out of the catacombs, but to keep their denizens in.

The Thuleslani had still refused to go. They scratched their pattern-tattooed chins in mock contemplation, and consulted what meager means of divination they had at their disposal. They decided the signs said they would die if they went. The truth, Zakoji suspected, was that the strange lassitude that afflicted the people of Ghothrune had begun to affect them as well.

He vowed he wouldn’t succumb to such a fate. If Heaven willed that he brave ancient tunnels and subterranean creatures to escape it, then so be it. He was Zakoji of the warrior caste of Tsann, and a former paladin of the Empress.

Zakoji gathered a few supplies then got directions from one of the monks as to which entrance to take. With light, a steady pace, and luck, a man could make it in a day. He would come through the path to a cave whose mouth practically overlooked the place where the ships had docked.

With light, a steady pace, and luck.

Those had proved more elusive than Zakoji had foreseen. He had lost his light, and there were dangers abiding in the dark.

It would avail him little to waste further thought on his fate. He walked on, moving as quickly as he could without hurling himself blindly into the unknown. Occasionally, he would see brief flashes like tiny will-o’-wisps dart in front of him. He decided that this was merely his mind playing tricks—responding to his eyes’ hunger for light.

The darkness outside the small light of his candle was more than total; it was almost palpable. It seemed to squeeze in on him, to try to envelop him. He quickened his step as much as he dared, attempting to outpace the sensation.

Lost in his thoughts, it perhaps took him longer than it might have to notice the sound of footsteps trailing him. The sound was not like the gentle rasping of his fur boots, nor the four-footed padding of some animal. It sounded like the bare feet of the things that approached him earlier, the catacomb-dwellers.

Zakoji quickened his pace. Better to outdistance them than face them in the dark tunnels they called home. Intent on the footfalls behind him, he only too late noticed the scratching above him.

There was a throaty cry that made Zakoji’s skin crawl. One of the dwellers dropped from the ceiling. Zakoji fell to floor under the thing’s assault. He dropped his candle and it rolled, still lit, through a circular doorway on the left side of the tunnel. The thing’s breath was hot and damp on his cheek, and smelled of rot. Zakoji yanked his sword from his sash and brought it up between them. Its pommel struck the thing under the chin. At the same time, Zakoji twisted his body and threw the thing off him.

It struck the tunnel wall, but was quickly on its feet. It lunged again, braying wetly.

Zakoji’s sword slash caught it across the middle in mid-lunge. Its noise died abruptly in its throat, and it fell away, all but cleaved in two.

Zakoji felt for the open passageway then stepped through. The candle still burned, barely, on the ground in front of him. He would’ve snatched it up, if he hadn’t been forced to turn and face the charge of the catacomb-dwellers.

He ducked the leap of the first, slashing it from throat to groin as it passed over him. This motion flowed easily into cutting the throat of the next. In its haste the third impaled itself on Zakoji’s blade. Its long-fingered, grimy-nailed hands reached for his face, even as its death rattle left its throat.

Three died, but more followed. There were ten or more, pressed so close and attacking so suddenly Zakoji couldn’t count them. With his blade not yet freed, the things overran him, and the weight of wiry bodies pushed him to the floor. Their fall blew the candle out and the dark engulfed them all.

Zakoji fought them hand to hand. Their skin was like an eel’s. Their bodies seemed all sinew and muscle, as if their bones were less solid than normal creatures. Their clawing hands were relentless; their stinking maws snapped at him from everywhere in the darkness.

Neither Zakoji nor his foes noticed the dark soften from an absolute black to a gray-brown. They didn’t see the ghostly radiance become a thing unto itself—an anemic blue glow spreading across the room. Zakoji did finally take notice when a pinprick of pale light emerged in the doorway, like a wound in the body of the dark.

The catacomb-dwellers took notice too, though by nonhuman means, as they were completely sightless. The bulges where their eyes would be were grown over by pasty, gray skin. They sensed it somehow, that was certain. They moaned and cringed from the approaching light like it was the sun itself come into their tunnels.

They slunk away to the walls, clawing at them, trying to find some way to escape the light as it came ever closer. It moved from the threshold into the room. Its source was a globe, held high.

The light, though really only a pale glow, stung Zakoji’s eyes as well, accustomed as they had become to darkness. He was able to make out that a human, and unmistakably feminine, silhouette held the globe aloft.

The bearer of the globe spoke in tones of command. The words were strange and like no human language Zakoji had ever heard. Its effect on the catacomb-dwellers was instantaneous. They fell almost in unison to their knees, tortured moans warbling in their throats.

Again the woman bearing the light spoke. Cringing, crawling, the things withdrew from the room back into the tunnels. In moments, even their plaintive sounds had faded into the darkness beyond the blue light’s reach.

As the catacomb-dwellers retreated, Zakoji got to his feet. He pulled his sword from the body of one of the creatures. He flicked the blood from his blade, then resheathed it. He did these things, and he watched the woman approach.

Strange how she didn’t seem to traverse all the distance between where she first stood and where she finally stood in front of him. Close enough to touch him. She was slight, but well formed, and unmistakably so, in her sheer gown that left one shoulder bare. The gown and the body that wore it were both white and completely unblemished as far as Zakoji could tell in the blue glow. But the gown was hazy, like congealed mist, while the woman’s skin was like fine porcelain.

Her eyes, larger than human and almost cat-like, looked up at him. They were a blue as pale as the Frozen Sea, a blue as pale as the light she carried. She smiled.

“Who are you?” Zakoji asked.

“I am of the catacombs.” She answered in the tongue of the Empire, without a trace of an accent. She was undeniably beautiful, but there was a quality to that beauty Zakoji couldn’t give name that unsettled as much as it pleased.

Zakoji’s face must have given away some hint of his unease, because the woman said, “There are more in these tunnels than the degenerate creatures that attacked you. We find this ancient place a better home than the frozen top of the mesa.”

Zakoji gave her a curt nod of acknowledgement. “The way out of these tunnels…is it far?”

“No, warrior,” she said. “Not far. I will take you, but you should tend your wound first.”

She gestured to his left arm. Zakoji lifted it to examine it in the pale light. There was a bleeding cut along his forearm he hadn’t noticed. It wasn’t deep, but Zakoji had seen wounds just as superficial fester and poison the man who bore them without the proper attention.

“Sit,” the woman said. “Rest a moment and treat the wound. The creatures will not return soon.”

The woman knelt on the stone and placed the orb next to her. She looked up at Zakoji, expectantly.

Zakoji sat down, cross-legged, on the other side of the light globe. Now that his eyes were more adjusted to the light, he could see that it was a crystalline sphere half-full with a viscous, translucent, pale blue liquid. It was this liquid that was luminescent. Zakoji was sure that it was the source of the lighting within the lamasery above, as well. The odd color of the light was the same.

He found the bottom edge of his silk under-robe. After cutting the hem with his knife, he tore off two strips of cloth. The first he used to clean away the blood and dirt from his forearm.

The woman watched him with an expression he couldn’t read. “You are a warrior of Tsann?” she asked, her tone amused. “A knight out of the epics?”

Zakoji was unsure if she mocked him, but he answered nonetheless. “I was born of the warrior caste, but I am no knight. I am wood adrift on the waves; a leaf borne by the wind.”

“A masterless knight-errant, then,” she said.

Zakoji didn’t reply. He took the second strip of silk and bound his wound. Then, he flexed and extended his arm until he satisfied himself that the bandage would hold.

When that was done, he said to the women, “Your knowledge of my homeland is surprising.”

She laughed; it was a pleasant sound, out of place in its surroundings. “The outside world may have forgotten us, but we have not forgotten it.”

Zakoji nodded. Though he didn’t know why, he had the feeling the woman was deceiving him, or least holding something back.

“Your people,” he asked. “Where are they?”

“We live in more hospitable branches of the catacombs,” she said. “We seldom venture here, but when we learned of your presence, I was sent to guide you.” She took the globe in her hand once again. “Tell me, warrior: why did you brave the catacombs alone?”

“The gods decide my fate, the same as any other man’s,” Zakoji said. “But even they can’t make me sit passively to await it.”

The woman regarded him for a moment, then she rose gracefully to her feet. “Come. We should go now. The catacomb-dwellers should remain cowed, but it would wise not to test them.”

Zakoji didn’t get to his feet immediately. He didn’t trust her. While she offered him escape, she could just as easily be leading him to his doom.

The woman stopped in the doorway and turned to look at him.

“Come.” Her expression and tone bespoke impatience

Yet he had no choice. Her presence, or the light she carried, frightened the catacomb-dwellers. Without knowing which, he could scarcely take the light from her, even had he been willing to do so. Though the truth was far from pleasing, without her he was unprotected and lost in the dark.

Zakoji did the only thing he could. He got to his feet, then followed.

They walked on in the blue light. How long they continued in the tunnels, Zakoji couldn’t say. He had lost any reference for the passage of time. As they went he heard the gurgling cries of the catacomb-dwellers, the bellows of creatures similar to the grub-like thing he had slain, and several other bestial sounds he couldn’t identify. It was as if their passing brought all the things of the darkness awake. Whether they were protesting the light, or paying it rude homage, Zakoji didn’t know.

He put his hand on the hilt of his sword.

The woman must have noticed because in an amused tone, she said, “There is no need. We are in no danger.”

“Do they always react this way when you pass?”

“The light,” she said. “They recognize it.”

They walked on. The tunnel seemed to take a small, but noticeable upward slope. Zakoji was heartened by this, small thing though it was.

After a time, they seemed to reach the tunnel’s end. The wall in front of them was unlike any Zakoji had seen in the tunnels before. It was bare and rough-hewn, and had a gap running vertically in it.

“Here is your way out, warrior,” the woman said. “This is a door that opens at the back of a cave at the base of the plateau.”

Zakoji traced the seam in the wall with his hand. “How do I open it?”

The woman extended her hand holding the blue-lit globe. She spoke words in a guttural language that seem incongruous coming from her lips.

There was a sound like stone grinding against stone. After a moment, the gap between the stones began to widen, and it continued to widen until it was spread enough for a man to squeeze through sideways. Zakoji felt air blow through the new-made gap—cold, fresh, and briny.

“My thanks,” Zakoji said. Wasting no time, he stepped toward the opening.

The woman stopped him with a hand on his arm. “Wait. You can’t be sure how long you will search before you find others. Let me give you supplies.”

Zakoji studied her. He read no treachery in her large, pale eyes, or in the slight smile on her thin lips.

“All right.”

The woman gestured to another door to her left—a door where Zakoji was sure there had been only the tunnel wall before. Now the tiles seemed to have been spread apart in an alternating fashion around a vaguely diamond-shaped opening. They looked like black teeth in some alien maw.

“This is one of our storage rooms,” the woman said. “You may take anything you need.”

Zakoji hesitated. He still felt unsettled; but the woman had led him to the exit, and he would likely need provisions. Again, he decided he had to follow her. He stepped through the opening in the wall.

The room was larger than any he had seem in the catacombs. It was oval in shape and its walls were completely smooth. Not only were they unadorned, but there appeared to be no joints or seams where the stone had been fitted together. It was like a bubble, but one formed in rock. A narrow walkway rimmed a wide pit in the room’s center. Emanating from the pit, beyond the obscuring edge of the walk, was a blue glow.

“What is this?” Zakoji asked. He thought he heard, faintly, but distinctly, a murmuring sound.

“Look for yourself.” The woman said. “This is the reason we have come.”

Zakoji stepped out onto the walk. The pit was filled with the glowing blue liquid, deep enough here so that it was opaque. Thick-walled bubbles, risen from its unknown depths, periodically broke the luminescent smoothness of its surface. Now that he was closer, the murmuring was louder. It was like the distant sound of a crowd.

“This is the truth of the catacombs,” the woman said from behind him. “Their heart. The reason for the catacombs and the monastery built above, though the fool monks have only a vague inkling of this. The ancestors of the catacomb-dwellers guessed more—and you’ve seen what that knowledge has wrought with them.”

“It’s alive,” Zakoji said, quietly. He shook his head as if denying the truth of the realization.

The woman laughed. There was mockery in the sound. “It’s a husk. A remnant.”

“A husk?” Zakoji was barely listening. He strained to make out the words that rose on the blue light.

“It is the remnant of a god.” The woman replied. “It is all that is left of one of those that began the world’s creation in their glorious, terrible image. The usurper young gods…they razed true creation, and erected this callow mockery in its place.”

There was a timbre of excitement in her voice, like she was on the verge of ecstasy.

“This is one of the Old Ones?” Tales Zakoji had learned from childhood made him recoil from the rim of the pit. From the priests tending the shrines of the Thrice-Million Gods, to itinerant monks of the Ascended One preaching on the roadside, the religions of the Empire warned of the Old Ones—the monstrous, inhuman, god-things that had been overthrown by the virtuous gods.

The gods had destroyed as many of their forebears as they could, and imprisoned or bound those they could not. They caused the captured Old Ones to re-dream the world into a place where they and their chosen followers, humanity, might prosper. The Old Ones were anathema to the world of man.

But there were always rumors. It was whispered that there remained humans and nonhumans that held to the Old Ones, and worshipped them in hidden rites for forbidden rewards.

There was a sound like a gong being struck. Ripples spread out across the surface of the liquid like it was a pond that a large stone had been thrown into.

Zakoji spun around to face the woman. He grasped the hilt of his sword. “Why did you bring me here, woman?” he snarled.

But the woman wasn’t there.

“Its mindless now, this god-remnant.” Her voice seemed to reverberate from the entire room, and it was different now, more like a chorus than a single voice. “Or more truthfully, its mind is made for a different world.”

Zakoji scanned the room. The woman was nowhere to be seen. Warily, he moved toward the door.

“Can you imagine being cut off from all sensation?” The woman or chorus of women went on. The sound of the voices was becoming shrill. “It steals forms and sensations from the crude matter of this world, then fashions puppets of its own to experience the physicality of our lives and deaths. All the things of the catacombs are its creations, its worshippers, or both. It hungers for experience. For…absorbance.”

Zakoji’s acute senses saved him. Just at the door, he spun around, and drew his sword in one fluid motion, executing perfectly the “Scythe at Reaping” sword-form. His blade slashed the woman who had appeared behind him across the throat.

The chorus of voices cried and shattered, becoming discordant. The blow should have cut her head from her neck. Instead her head only lolled, and luminescent, viscous, blue liquid oozed from her wound instead of blood.

The voices wailed. From the toppling body of the woman and from the pit, they wailed. But in the raw anger of the noise, Zakoji heard one word: desecration.

At the same time, the bubbling in the liquid grew louder. The remains of the Old One roiled against the sides of the pit. It was like a cauldron about to boil over.

Zakoji leaped through the opening in the wall. In the tunnel, he heard the sounds of the creatures of the darkness again, calling out in outrage or despair. They were coming closer. And he feared, so was the cacophonous sludge behind him.

But the narrow gap that he prayed led to the outside was still open. Without sparing another glance backward, he slid through the gap, followed by the cries of the shadow of a dead god and worshippers it had spawned.

Faint, white sunlight guided Zakoji to the mouth of the cave. He looked back from time to time to make sure he wasn’t followed, but nothing emerged from the catacombs. He didn’t know why, but he thanked the gods and the Ascended One for it, all the same.

As he stood at the cave’s mouth, snow was falling, but the wind was gentle. Regardless, it was bitterly cold. Zakoji shivered, and pulled his cloak in tighter around him. Looking into the sky, he smiled.

The northern sky was gray and drear, but behind it, muted, was the pure light of the sun.

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