“Jiiiddaaaaii.”īlind to Keres' plight in the underlevels below, Ermir Marcus raised his hand. Their own masks were bone, seven skulls grinning beneath raised hoods of tattered black. “Jiiiidaaaiii!” the shadow slayers whispered, slinking from the blackness with pitted swords of iron held aloft in skeletal hands. They wore copper masks, and their hands, outstretched as if intent on causing Keres to stumble, bore no lightsabers.Īnd the darkness answered. Perfect, at least, until the last class.īodies lay around Keres, barely visible at the periphery of the torch's light. The perfect trap, overriding an acolyte's skepticism of such self-sabotaging instructions through the sheer authority of their own regent's orders.
To a master of the lost art of mechu deru, sending a message via the Temple's central training programme was no difficult feat. The screen raced with letters beneath the fiend's black fingernails, flashing between splotches of green and blue with epileptic frenzy. In her hands was a device resembling a datapad, wires trailing to a crooked niche in the wall behind, suggesting it had been torn out.
A Zabrak without horns? A Zeltron with glowing eyes? The fiend was no species Keres had ever seen before.
KNIGHTS OF THE EMPIRE SKIN
She turned, as if detecting Keres' presence, and in the flickering light of the torch the demoniac shade of her crimson skin was laid bare, creasing around a rotting half-smile of exposed molars. A keen student of history might recognise the cruel, hoary countenance of Karness Muur, dead eyes staring with sightless malice above beards of stone.Ī woman stood in front of the archway of darkness. Beside the torch was an archway, beyond which nothing could be seen, two more wall-mounted sconces, yet unlit, and two statues, identical save for where millennia of erosion had worn away a crudely carved helmet. A torch flickered to life, unbidden, and the darkness retreated but ten meters, as if temporarily repelled by the tongues of flame flicking from the wall, but circling with rapine intent. Not even the glimmer of a lightsaber could pierce the gloom, only, at most, shed the barest illumination upon where the stair abruptly terminated into blackness with each sudden turn.Ī hundred blind footsteps, twenty twists of the coil, and the stair ended. The dark side was strong here, and oppressive. A great silence descended, broken only by the intermittent patter of pebbles and scattered rock–and the gasping breaths of those unfortunate few who dared ever descend the secret stair, as the air grew stale and musty, dust rising to choke lungs already shuddering in the clotted perfumes of decay. The sounds of the dungeons above faded with its light, the faint glow of the passageway whence Keres had come shrinking down to a distant window of flickering orange. The echoes of falling stone indicated a gargantuan cavern. The wall to the left, the only support a hand might seek, gave away after only twelve feet, as the stair continued its relentless convolutions into the midst of a sea of black infinity. The precipitous spiral had no rail, and each ginger footfall down the craggy vertebrae of its steps was accompanied by the perilous sound of pebbles crumbling away underfoot, skittering in the pitch-black depths. The stair beneath the dungeons resembled the spinal column of a sea leviathan, a long, thin rope of uneven rock winding down into an ocean of darkness.