The Keeper And The Dragons Ch 09

Chapter 9

Ashanti Forge, Alfheim

Interlude

Ten years ago

The dungeon of Ashanti Forge's Keep would perfectly fit a Christian's vision of hell. Geothermal vents turned the chamber into a furnace, making it hot and intensely humid. The walls blanketed with millions of glowworms, feeding on the lichens and fungi, gave the room a dim blue-green glow. The worms were quite poisonous; thousands of tiny venomous barbs covered their bodies.

Lachlan Quinn, imprisoned naked in a four-foot cage affixed to that wall twenty feet off the floor, had done his best to avoid brushing against them, with little success. His skin was covered in scores of suppurating stings. He'd first tested the cage's strength, searching for a flaw in the welds with no luck. To make matters worse, his symbiote weapons were inert. While the glyphs incised by the troll women rendered him immune to most magic, the Dökkálfar had bespelled the cage with blood magic.

He didn't mind; he was where he needed to be. So, he ignored the discomfort—he had learned long ago that pain was just a message in his brain. He used the time in the cage as a practice aide to enhance his powers of concentration. The troll women who trained him had spent countless months teaching his mind and body all about pain and endurance until they deemed him fit enough to learn what they called the flow of the warrior. In the years that followed, he had become a weapon—hammered, heated and quenched by battle after battle. They would ask him how he had used the opportunity to practice that his captivity provided. They punished wastefulness.

He'd allowed himself to be netted like a roe deer in a boggle's snare three months ago as he followed up rumors about a haunting of soul-eaters in the Ashanti territory. Daemon-kind were distant cousins of Faery kind from the realm called Niflheimr. They were master sorcerers, plying the blood magic of old gods. Their presence in Alfheim was anathema absolute with the Sidhe. Any being or clan communicating with them would lead the entire Sidhe race to unite and rise up to destroy the transgressor.

They had caged him for weeks while they awaited some personage or other. The orc guards knew that physical torture was useless against him, so they ignored him except for occasional beatings. Quinn didn't mind waiting. He was very good at waiting. He was inside the keep and doing his job that he had decided was his last for the troll women.

The waiting ended when the Exarch of the Dökkálfar Ashanti ushered a Daoine lordling and two scarlet-cowled Daemon-kind sorcerers. The two soul-eaters were typical of their class—virtually identical, hairless, green pebbled crocodilian skin and eyes the color of blood.

The Daoine held an ornate orb swinging on a silver chain.

Quinn recognized it instantly. A Mind Ripper. Where the Dökkálfar were smiths, masters of the hard sciences. The Daoine were biologists and psychologists. To aid their understanding of the biology of beings they ruled, they had long ago invented a device that could fully delve into a living brain to record its physical and emotional experiences. The healers used it to cure trauma—damaged slaves were inefficient. They also served to mind-wipe recalcitrant slaves.

Inquisitors used them differently. A fact the troll women knew well when they insisted on putting blocks in his mind to prevent its prying.

The Exarch looked up at Quinn. "Human, far too long have the Sidhe allowed the Vísdómur to meddle in our affairs. I will end that today, but if you answer this lord's questions. I will grant you the boon of a quick death. Refuse and I will show you how the Ashanti deal with any of the slave races who dare oppose us. "

Quinn remained silent.

The Exarch smiled and made a gesture.

The Daoine started the questioning immediately. His voice shifting between soft and persuasive, and harsh and demanding.

"Where is the Megile?"

From the first, the questioning bewildered Quinn. He had no idea of what Megile even was, let alone where it was. He settled down to resist and try to discover more.

"What is a Megile? I do not understand..."

The Daoine activated the orb and nodded to the scarlet clad sorcerers. A squat orc guard ushered in a pair of ragged dwarf prisoners who looked around the room with dull, defeated eyes. One of the daemons seized the dwarf on the left and cut the left one's throat with a curved bronze knife. The other produced a black bowl to capture the blood. Both chanted. Instantly, blood magic bloomed, filling the room with the smell of brimstone and heated copper.

A spell enveloped Quinn. It held him helpless, while it slithered through his mind; his blocking wards dissolved like wisps of fog on a sunny day.

Not all torture is about physical pain. They didn't even need to take Quinn out of his cage.

The first experience the device transmitted was the last moments of a little dwarven boy and his family. Agate, or Aggie, as his mother called him, became Lachlan, and Lachlan was Aggie. They were nine years old, barely out of diapers for a dwarven-kind. As they watched, a squad of Ashanti warrior orcs cut open their mama's belly and dragged her insides out. And then they did the same to Rock, their big brother. Next was little sister Goldie. For the rest of his life, Quinn was to dream of her soft brown eyes begging him for help. Two of the orcs seized her by the ankles and bashed her head on the cooking hearth.

And laughed.

Then they started on Aggie/Lachlan. Two of them held him; the third sliced his tummy open. Aggie/Lachlan screamed and screamed until blessed blackness came.

Quinn regained consciousness, bloody and bruised from beating his head on the walls of the cage that held him. A whole trickery of fairy-folk clustered around his cage dancing, drunk with the taste of his pain, sorrow and hate.

"Where is the scroll?"

Quinn started his battle chant:

"My name is Lachlan Joseph Quinn—Venu la bataille, vient la mort," (come battle, come death)

The Daoine's voice was a soft insidious metronome asking the same question over and over in High Alfar and Low.

"Where does your master keep the Grisa Rune?"

Mindless hoarse whisper. "My name is Lachlan Joseph Quinn—Venu la bataille, vient la mort,"

Aggie and Goldie's torments were not the last in the days/nights that followed. Lachlan experienced the torture and deaths of beings of every species he'd heard of and some he hadn't.

It wasn't until the white-haired Daoine switched viewpoints on the Orb that he slipped into madness.

Now the orb sent him the memories and emotional experiences of a warrior Orc named Zex.

Lachlan/Zex gloried in frenzied blood lust as they slaughtered the innocent, laughing with delighted glee at the cries of the pitiful cries of the victims, young and old. They dashed the heads of squalling babies against the stone of the huts and laughed at the despairing wails of mothers. He raped, then slaughtered the mothers. He gloried in the driving blood-lust of pillage.

The Daoine watched his expression avid.

"My name..."

"Yes, what is your name?" the Daoine's voice was a kind caress.

An inward look. Puzzled.

"Again,"

On the third day, Lachlan Quinn, the troll woman's teen-aged shadow walker, went fully mad. When he regained consciousness some timeless while later, he found another being sharing his mind—a being of smoke and fog and cold eyes blacker than midnight.

It thought: "You have finally awakened me. Bide brother, our time comes. Patience. We will have justice. We will have our vengeance."

The two daemons' magic flared again, The Daine's voice started again, "Where..."

The being whispered:

"Now, my brother. We become wrath."

And they merged.

Lachlan Quinn became — a cold being of the light and the dark—of order and chaos. He instantly analyzed a vast field sensory experience flooding in and quickly sensed the weakest points of the welds that joined the cage bars. He drove a heel into them, shattered them and launched himself out of his cage.

His scream froze the watchers who clustered around the cage.

--"Venu la bataille, vient la mort."

The two daemons were the first to die. Two lightning-swift blows from calloused hands, and they were down.

The quelling power of their spell craft died with them.

The glyphs incised into his back flared white. The dragon whip awoke.

Death came next for the white-haired Daoine who had questioned him. His severed head hit the floor, face still showing dawning terror.

Quinn absently collected the head along with the heads of the daemons and moved on, the dragon's razor whip writhing around him—lighting the cavern, blinding-white-bright with the life force it fed on.

The trickery of fairies' indulgent giggles changed to a shrieks of terror when he stalked into their midst and ripped their limbs asunder.

Lachlan Quinn, dead-eyed, face streaked with tears, the dragon's razor whip undulating around him lighting the way, walked on, singing a dirge in high alfar — singing the names of each of the beings whose tortures and deaths he had shared/caused. He drifted through the shadows of the vast keep, slaughtering every Ashanti he came upon. Moving steadily upward toward the Great Hall. The slaves he met along the way took one look and fled.

He slew ten huge genetically altered warrior orcs when they tried to stay his entrance into the Ancestral Hall. Then stepped into the hall and beheld the cream of Ashanti Sidhe as they gathered together for midsummer's feast. His rage burst and he screamed. The sound stilled the laughter. As the tall, slender immortal lordlings stood gaping at the blood-covered apparition who had appeared in their midst, the unthinkable happened. Never in the eons long history of the Sidhe had Death come to reap an entire Forge.

In the end, Quinn stood before the kneeling Exarch. The whip flashed, and then there was only Lachlan Quinn standing among the dead—still chanting his dirge to the victims of the Ashanti.

He piled the all banners and all scrolls from the walls of the room, priceless histories and artifacts that heralded the centuries of the greatness of the Ashanti. He lit it all afire. Then ascended the long steps to the ancient gardens on the surface and laid waste to it all.

Flames swirled and whirled below and above, a tornado of cleansing fire.

Lachlan Quinn, the human they called the Shadow Walker, with the heads of the two demons and the Daoine in a bag at his feet watched the burning and let the heat of the fires dry the tears on his face as he recited the last of the names — Aggie the little dwarven boy.

There was no peace, no absolution for him. He feared there never would be again.

The three troll women appeared around him. They eyed him calmly.

"You have awakened the Grendel," said the seer.

Quinn nodded. He opened the sack and dumped the two demon heads and that of the renegade Daoine at their feet.

"I am done with you," he said. "I am going home."