by Gregory Ashe
Chapter 71
Siniq-elb bent awkwardly and grabbed the sword. Brown sludge stained one edge. The blade was bent slightly at the hilt, as though it had been subjected to tremendous force. Siniq-elb bit the inside of his cheek as a wave of jealousy ran over him; the sarkomancer’s attack had been graceful, but it had been far from skilled. What would a skilled warrior, like Siniq-elb, be able to do with the dew? It brought a single heart-beat thump of pain and self-pity that he shoved away.
“You can come out,” he said, turning to the tunnel where Mece hid. “We need to go now. The seiri are starting to waken.”
Mece emerged from the darkness. “He saw me,” she said. “Even in the darkness. He looked right at me and kept going.”
“He wasn’t here for us.”
“What did you mean about a war?” Vas said. He still looked hurt—emotionally and physically—but the curiosity had returned to his eyes. “And are these really seiri? How can you tell?”
Siniq-elb stared at Vas for a moment before realizing that his mouth was hanging open. He glanced at Mece.
“It might be helpful for us to know,” was all she said.
“Tair help me,” Siniq-elb said. “I don’t know. I thought at first they were weapons, for the war against the rebels. But now I’m not so sure; the other su-eses would have known about them, it wouldn’t have needed to be a secret. And Dakel wouldn’t have been so afraid. I think they’re part of a faction within the temple, some plan of Khylar’s. Maybe to overthrow the tair. I don’t know. As for identifying them, once you see one, you’ll know. They’re impossible to forget.”
Mece nodded. Without any apparent disgust, she knelt next to Khylar’s body and pried the kitchen knife free, wiping it clean on the green robes.
“Siniq-elb, when we get out of here, you have to tell me all about this,” Vas said. “People need to know—this will change everything. What we know about the seiri. Their relationship to the temple. The tair’s control over them. Khi’ilan politics.” He smiled and suddenly he was the old Vas again. “It’ll be the most heretical book in the next hundred years!”
“Later,” Mece said. “Let’s get out of here first.”
“No time for that, I’m afraid,” a cool voice said.
Siniq-elb spun to find a woman dressed all in white standing a few feet away. Her hair was as white as her dress; her skin pale and smooth. Her lips, dark crimson, were the only color he could find in her.
“Who are you?” Siniq-elb said.
“So this is what Khylar was planning, was it?” she said. “What a fool; the seiri are impossibly hard to control. The tair made them that way, you know. He didn’t want anyone else playing with his pets, least of all the Father. Even dead, he has a nasty habit of interfering. Tair bless us, the number of wights I’ve had to put down today alone makes him almost as much a nuisance dead as he was alive.”
“You knew?” Siniq-elb said. “And you let him make these things?”
“I didn’t know; tair, I didn’t even suspect. Who would ever be so foolish as to create seiri without the tair’s supervision? He must have thought he would use them to overwhelm us. If Balat could see this, he would be furious. He wanted to make seiri so badly, but he never had the courage.”
“Who are you?” Siniq-elb said. He took a step sideway, closer to Mece, but also positioning himself in front of Khylar’s body. No telling how the woman would react to a dead su-esis. “What do you want?”
“You repeat yourself,” the woman said, still examining the terraces. “I imagine it makes you a bore of a companion.”
“And you don’t answer questions. We need to leave before the seiri wake.”
“They won’t awaken,” the woman said. “Not until they’ve been fed.”
“Tell that to that one,” Siniq-elb said, nodding to the seir that the strange sarkomancer had beheaded. “They’ve been fed.”
The white woman stalked over to the lowest terrace, oblivious to the black earth that stained the hem of her dress. She looked at the seir for a few moments, changing position several times, but not touching it. With her attention occupied, Siniq-elb nodded to Vas and Mece and gestured toward the closest staircase. Vas first, then Mece, and Siniq-elb last of all, the sword clutched against the handle of the crutch. Siniq-elb kept himself between her and Khylar as best he could, trying to keep her from realizing they had killed a su-esis.
“Stop,” the woman said. She turned toward them, wiping her hands on her dress. “Where is Khylar? What are you doing down here?”
Mece had reached the first step, and Vas was a third of the way up to the top. They just needed a bit more time. Time to get to the basement and seal the hidden passage behind them.
“Come over here and I’ll show you,” Siniq-elb said. He propped the crutch casually under one arm and gestured with the sword.
“Did Khylar get bit by one his little garden snakes?” the woman said, a smile parting her too red lips. “Tair, that’s almost amusing enough to make this whole disaster worth something. You finally got your revenge, did you? He took your feet, you took his life?”
“Something like that.” Vas, tair bless him, had kept moving, but Mece had stopped halfway up the stairs and was looking back at him. Siniq-elb made a small gesture for her to go, and the pale woman’s eyes followed his movement.
“No,” she said. “No one is leaving. Not until I have some answers. Come back right now. I may let you live.”
“Being su-esis didn’t save Khylar,” Siniq-elb said, motioning again toward Khylar’s corpse. “What makes you think you’re any different?”
The woman vanished. No blurring, just gone. And a heartbeat later Vas let out a cry. The pale woman stood above him, her hand tight on his injured shoulder, and Vas cringed beneath her grip.
“Back down,” she said.
Vas stumbled down ahead of her, face ashen, and Mece slid one arm around Vas’s uninjured side to help him down the stairs. The pale woman followed, expressionless, her eyes running up and down the terraces to either side. If she was upset, nothing registered in her face; no cracking noises signaled the awakening of other seiri, but Siniq-elb wanted to be far from the pit and the Garden. His fingers tightened around the sword and he glanced at Khylar’s body. The blade would do nothing; she was a su-esis as well or, worse, one of the Renewed. A salt-blade, though, would change everything. One woman against three. It would have to be enough.
He moved over to the corpse, the sound of their descent measuring out the time they had left. When they reached the bottom of the pit, the woman would turn her attention back to them. He dropped the crutches, fell to his knees, rolled Khylar onto his stomach. The metal of the hilt was cold against his hand. Try as he might, Siniq-elb could not free the blade. The body was cooling, and as he wrestled with the knife, trickles of thickening blood spread out from the wound.
“What are you doing?” the pale woman’s voice came.
Siniq-elb ignored her, twisting the hilt, yanking at the blade, the muscles in his shoulder aching like he had practiced a day in the yard with his sword.
“Stop it.”
Siniq-elb glanced up. Mece and Vas stood at the bottom of the pit, a few paces away, the woman in white stood a step above them. Her gaze was fixed on Siniq-elb, her eyes like twin chips of ice.
“Leave that there. The salt poisons his blood; it will take them longer to wake. Tair help us all if they were to be woken with the blood of a sarkomancer or a Renewed; they’d be a hundred times worse.”
Siniq-elb ignored her, tugging at the handle. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the pale woman start down the stairs, her too-red mouth settling into a hard line. As she stepped onto the floor of the pit, Mece spun, something flashing in her hand. Siniq-elb turned to watch, but it happened too quickly. An angry hiss, a choked cry, and Mece flew across the room to hit the edge of the tunnel wall. Her body struck the packed earth with a low thud, and she slid to rest on the floor.
“No,” Siniq-elb shou
ted. He scrambled across the floor toward Mece. The knife was forgotten. The crutches were forgotten. Stones scratched at his palms and knees, but he barely felt them. There was only Mece, her body curved forward, hair sliding over her lips, eyes closed. The space measured in heartbeats, each one drawn and painful, a contracting of the whole body that brought him closer to her.
And then the woman in white had Siniq-elb by the throat, lifting him well above her head, and staring up into his eyes. Her fingers choked him. Siniq-elb hammered at her with his fists, kicked with his stumps in spite of the pain that flared through him, but it was like striking a block of white granite. She stood there staring up at him.
“I would have liked to know why Khylar brought you here. I think I would have enjoyed hearing you tell how you killed him—seeing the light in your eyes when you thought of your revenge. I don’t have time for this, though; the seiri will wake, even with salted blood, and with the army besieging the temple, I have too many other things to deal with. Enjoy the last few moments of your revenge, cripple; you have proved that the Garden does not break a man completely. I will speak to the tair about how to change that.”
Her fingers tightened, stone wedges that cut into the soft flesh of his neck, crushing cartilage. Stars and darkness spun around him, and the shadows overhead toppled inward, swallowing the pit and everything in it.
And then Siniq-elb hit the ground, hard enough to send a jolt through his whole body, and air—rank with the miasma of the pit, but enough to clear Siniq-elb’s vision—rushed into his lungs. Mece lay nearby, unmoving, and Vas cowered at the edge of the stairs, but Siniq-elb stared at scene in front of him.
Two figures, blurred into streams of color—one white, the other brown and green—spun across the floor of the pit. Then they twisted upright and settled into place. The woman in white stood at the corner of the pit’s base, one hand pressed to her side, and a grimace on her face. A few paces away, fists raised, stood a man dressed in green and brown. He was stout, but not like Vas—this man was rugged, layered with muscle—and a dark beard covered his face.
“You’re getting slower, Ayde,” the bearded man said. “Sure you aren’t ready for another Renewal? I think the tair would oblige.”
The woman in white—Ayde—straightened, dropping her hands to her sides. She cocked her head, her lips pursed, as though ready to speak. And then she disappeared again. Almost immediately, the bearded man flew backward, as though struck. He hit the edge of the nearest terrace and continued to fly up, packed earth splitting and giving way as he was driven through edge after edge of the rising terraces. The damaged ledges split and shifted, pouring dirt down into the pit, and the bearded man’s flight did not stop until he disappeared from Siniq-elb’s sight.
Ayde. One of the lap-esis. And a Renewed. Siniq-elb looked at the line of damage, rising the length of the pit, and shivered. He didn’t know how the bearded man had saved him from Ayde, but he was dead now; no one could survive being slammed through tier after tier of packed soil.
“Vas,” Siniq-elb said. “Grab my crutches and get over here. You have to help me get Mece out of here.” He turned and crawled the rest of the way to Mece. Her chest rose and fell, but she was terribly still. Siniq-elb ran a hand along the side of her face, whispered her name, but she did not stir. “Vas! Hurry!”
Why had she attacked the woman in white? What did she think she could do with crippled hands and a dull kitchen knife? Staring down at Mece, Siniq-elb felt every breath of air burn his injured throat, and they seemed to pile up inside of him, pressing down on his heart, without escape.
“Vas!” His throat ached, but he shouted. “We need to go now!”
The stout man appeared next to him, pale and shaking, but the crutches in his hands. He pointed up at one of the highest terraces. A woman, almost invisible against the darkness, crouched, her gaze fixed on something across from her. Siniq-elb followed her gaze; the twin blurs still moved. Somehow the bearded man had survived. For the time being. But a third player meant that the fight would end soon—one way or another. And they needed to be gone before then.