by A. C. Cobble
“This is no cellar,” observed Duke from behind.
“Go back and close the door,” instructed Sam. “I’ve got a feeling we won’t want company for what we’re going to find down here.”
He complied, and when he returned with the torch, she led them into the hallway.
“What is this?” he wondered.
“This, I believe, is where Thotham has been,” murmured Sam. “His nest.”
She began to say more, but stopped, and instead kept walking down the narrow, stone corridor. There was no point in sharing her suspicions until they were proven correct or incorrect. Either way, the answers lay at the end of the tunnel.
Ahead of them, a sinister crimson glow lit the end of the pathway.
“If I was a sorcerer, that’s exactly the color of fae light I would choose,” whispered Duke.
“We should be quiet,” she hissed.
He didn’t respond.
She was hurrying, trying to keep her footsteps quiet but unable to resist the urge to increase her pace. In a moment, she was almost running when they cleared the tunnel and entered a wide, circular chamber. It was lit by a single red fae light that hung suspended in the center of the room.
Below the globe of the fae light, there was a waist-high altar. On one side of it, Thotham lay on the floor motionless. Beside the entrance to the room, another man dressed in the garb of the Church’s priests lay obviously dead. Duke cursed and raised his sword, facing something behind the altar, but by the time she circled it, ready to attack, they both realized it was no threat. A grimalkin, a brutal puncture marring its glossy black fur, was also dead.
“What in the frozen hell is this?” questioned Duke, staring around the room.
Sam rushed to the side of her mentor and knelt, putting two fingers against his neck. His eyes fluttered open and he offered a weak smile.
“What happened?” she asked.
“You saw my name outside?” he murmured, his voice barely a whisper. “Good. I was worried you would miss it, but I didn’t have time to come up with anything more elegant. I almost died getting out of the tunnel and back.”
She checked his body, looking for wounds, but she found none. “I don’t understand.”
Speaking slowly, he continued, “I almost died… to grant you what assistance I could.”
“You’re going to have to explain that to me,” said Duke, coming to stand beside her.
Thotham coughed weakly, and she looked around, trying to find water or something to give him.
“That’s unnecessary, girl,” he said. “In a moment, I won’t need it.”
“We thought… We thought you died,” said Sam, her fists closing tightly on the hilts of her daggers. “I scried for you. While we were still connected to the spirit…”
“I know,” rasped Thotham. “I felt it watching me, so I had to act before I was ready.”
“Why?”
“You found me using a spirit of the underworld,” explained Thotham. “That is their domain, not ours. The creature you ensnared was under your control for the moment, but you are not its master. There has been a change in the underworld, an accession of sorts. Ca-Mi-He has grown powerful, more powerful than I ever expected. Everything that spirit saw, everything it learned from you, in time, Ca-Mi-He would also know. My location, what I’ve been doing here… I tried to act quickly, but I wasn’t quick enough. I severed the connection, banishing your spirit, and I’ve been scrambling to finish my work since then. That man over there found me before I could. We fought, and I won, but it was a close thing. Much of my strength was already gone.”
“Was already gone?” questioned Sam.
“The spear on the altar,” instructed Thotham. “Get it.”
Duke moved to pick up the weapon and brought it back to Sam and her mentor.
She gasped when she saw it close. It was Thotham’s spear, the same one he’d carried with him ever since she’d known him, but it was different. All along the shaft, it was inscribed with fresh runes. From end to end, tiny symbols had been carved shallowly into the weapon.
“I don’t… I don’t know what these mean,” she admitted, peering closely at the compact script.
“They’re me. My life,” replied Thotham.
She looked at him, uncertain.
“I’ve imbued the spear with a part of me,” explained the man. “I bound my spirit to it, but moments before the last of the ritual, I was attacked. I could not finish.”
“You bound it to yourself so your spirit will not travel to the underworld when your life ends? Why would you do this?” demanded Sam.
Her mentor shifted, and she helped him to sit.
“The enemy knows who I am,” he said. “With the rise of Ca-Mi-He, they control the underworld and everything in it. My time is short, Sam. I am sick. Within the next year, maybe two, I would die no matter what happens. When I pass, I will fall under their power. I will be a creature in that dark place, just like any other, until time grinds me down, and I’m reborn again here. A spirit, just like any other, except they know me. When I die, they’ll find me and use me. They’ll use me against you, Sam. Against the Church. Against Enhover. The world.”
“Who will use you?” gasped Duke.
“That is what you two were meant to find out,” remarked Thotham, his eyelids fluttering heavily. “I know little of our enemy. I only know what they do. The two-decade long blight in Northundon, the murders, the ascension of Ca-Mi-He… I can see the results of their labor, but who are they… Until we know, we cannot fight them. The murder of the countess was an error, the first one they’ve made. She made contact with Ca-Mi-He somehow, and the spirit gave her a blessing. She tried to capitalize on it, but they found out. Our true enemies found out and killed her.”
“B-but…” stammered Sam.
“The countess was a sorceress, that is true,” acknowledged Thotham, breaking into a coughing fit before continuing, “but she was an amateur, little better than the practitioners of midnight rituals in the secret societies. Somehow, she got close to something she shouldn’t have, close to real power, and I believe they killed her for it. They left clues. The door is open for us to track them. Countess Dalyrimple’s death has set off a series of events that I believe are our opportunity. It’s the chance I’ve been waiting over twenty years for, ever since the prophecy... This is what I’ve trained you for, Sam. You and the duke are the ones who can follow this trail that I saw so long ago. Find out where it leads and who is at the end of it. I meant to give you one last gift, girl. I meant to bind myself to the weapon so that you’d have my strength when the time came.”
“Wait,” interjected Duke. “Hold on. You were going to kill yourself and be in that spear?”
Thotham nodded. “My spirit will inhabit the weapon when I die.”
“You cannot do that,” stated Sam, her hand tightening on her mentor’s arm.
“I cannot?” asked Thotham with a smile for his apprentice. “But I can. I’ve spent years preparing this ritual. Here, in Middlebury, in my sanctum, I made it possible. I primed the weapon, and if I wasn’t interrupted, it would have already happened. I intended to write you a note to explain myself and then fall on the spear. Your scrying, and the attention it drew, prevented me from finishing. When this steel drinks my blood, it will absorb my spirit and keep me from the clutches of Ca-Mi-He.”
“No,” argued Sam, “we need you.”
“You will have me, Samantha, and they will not,” argued Thotham, his voice a painful rasp. “My strength, my purpose, it will be in the weapon. I just need you to kill me with it.”
“Oh, this is getting strange,” worried Duke.
She ignored him and held her mentor’s gaze.
“Do it,” he said, his hard eyes meeting hers, no hesitation in his voice. “My vision… it’s always been you, Sam, and him. I can see that now. The enemy has stumbled, giving us a chance. We have a thread to follow. Kill me and follow that thread.”
She shook her
head. “You do not understand. Thotham, we need you. They covered their tracks, and we don’t know who is behind the killings. Every time we’ve pursued a lead, someone else dies. There are no more leads, Thotham. We have nowhere else to look.”
“You’ll find a way,” he insisted.
“I have,” she responded, sitting back on her heels, releasing her grip on her mentor. “I think, finally, I have.” She pointed to the dead priest across the room. “They must already know their assassin failed, but they’ll send more. Sorcerers, assassins, grimalkins, I don’t know what, but I do know they’ll come for you. That, Thotham, is the thread we have to follow. Let them come. Let them walk into our trap. Then, we can find out who is behind this. We have an opportunity to uncover who the enemy is, but we need you alive to do it. We will no longer look for them. They will look for us.”
“Bait,” murmured her mentor.
She nodded.
“If they get to me…” warned Thotham. “We cannot risk my soul falling into the wrong hands. I know too much about you, Samantha. With me under their thumbs, they could extract that information.”
“Will the spear be effective anywhere, or must the ritual be completed here?”
Thotham stared up at his apprentice, uncertain.
She was certain, though. Time and time again, they’d stumbled after their enemies, flailing in the dark, constantly one step behind. Now, they had an advantage. They had a way to ensure their quarry would come to them.
Finally, Thotham agreed, “If there were more sorcerers in Middlebury, they’d be here by now. We can assume that man was the only one working for our opponents who could make it here quickly. They’ll come, though, and when they do, we should be gone.”
“Gone?” wondered Duke. “I thought we wanted to stage a trap.”
“My protection in this place was its secrecy,” explained Thotham. “Now that it is no longer secret, they’ll be able to penetrate quickly and easily. We don’t have time to prepare to meet them here. We need to move, find somewhere we can plan, and then build our snare.”
“Where, though?” asked Sam.
“Westundon,” declared Duke. “With the ease they uncover our movements, I can only assume our enemies have a presence there. We have allies, though, and I have the perfect place to design and set a trap.”
“We can’t trust anyone,” complained Thotham. “Even your brother, the bishop, none of them.”
“We can go to my house,” insisted Duke. “There is space, resources, and I have people on my staff who’ve been with me since I was a child. I will stake my life that my valet Winchester is trustworthy. He can be our hands, moving in public while we remain in hiding. We’ll have the resources we need there, the space to set your snare, and visibility all around us. It will make sense to the enemy when we trigger the trap, and they find our location. They won’t suspect a thing.”
“Don’t you live in the palace?” questioned Sam.
“Most of the time,” agreed Duke with a grin. “I do have a house, though, set aside in a section of Wellesley Park. There’s open land around it, so we can watch if someone comes close. It’s a large estate, and I do entertain there sometimes, so it will not be unusual to see movement in and out. I don’t know if there’s a perfect place, but I think this will work, unless you have something better?”
Sam glared at him. He knew damn well the three of them could barely even fit in her apartment, much less set a trap for sorcerers there. The narrow stairwell and hallways around it would provide anyone cover until they were upon them.
She stood and looked around the circular chamber before turning back to her mentor. “Duke’s place it is, then. What do we collect from here? We don’t have much time. If they’re coming like we think they are, we’ll have several turns of the clock until they could reach us from any major city on the rail, but if they have an airship, they could be here in one or two turns.”
“What should we do about him?” wondered Duke, glancing at the corpse of the sorcerer. “Do you think we can identify him?”
“He was a priest,” rasped Thotham. “I recognize him from when I visited the Church here. You won’t find anything on him, though. Like Swinpool, our enemies have taken pains to remove any other clues that may tie their assassins to the rest of the group.”
Duke grunted.
“There, in that alcove, take any devices made of wood, glass, stone, or metal. Leave the rest. Leave the paper and the books,” instructed Thotham. He blinked wearily. “Then, we’ll light the fuse.”
The Initiate V
She pulled back the sleeve of her robe and used both hands to turn the page of the ancient tome. Brittle paper, rough under her fingers, threatened to crumble at the gentle motion. It had been years, she suspected, or maybe even decades since anyone had read the archaic script written on the yellowing parchment. Knowledge, dribbled in small, nearly indecipherable bits, lying untapped. She would tap it, though. She would learn.
Next to the manuscript, she turned a page in her notebook and began to painstakingly copy the words from the ancient text to her fresh one. Word for word, each symbol carefully replicated in full, no detail left out.
“I don’t understand,” drawled a man from behind her, “how a girl can get to be so beautiful by sitting in front of a desk all of the time.”
She ignored the voice and kept copying.
“Isisandra Dalyrimple,” continued the man, soft footsteps indicating he was walking closer. “Initiate in the Feet of Seheht of the first rank. Certainly the richest and most powerful girl of her age, stuck doing the menial labor of a clerk. A shame.”
Fearing he would draw close enough to see the text of the book she was working on, she finally turned and faced the man. He was young, perhaps five years her senior. A beautiful man, she supposed. His shoulders were broad, his arms thick with muscle. His hair curled like a wave down over his forehead, and as she watched, he flipped his head, shaking a silky lock out of his eyes. Those eyes bore down on her with hunger.
“Who are you?”
“I am Marcus,” he said, a smile forming on his lips.
He drew himself up, preening like a peacock looking for a mate. She had to admit, even in the voluminous robes the Feet of Seheht’s members wore, she could tell he was well built. A stud, she knew, brought in by one of the senior women in the society specifically for the more scandalous rites. Why let one of their overfed pale flabby husbands do it when such a fine specimen could handle the job.
“What do you want, Marcus?” she asked.
“Outside of these walls, you are high-society, and I am low,” he said, leaning casually against the winged back of a lounging chair. The same one the elder had sat in when she’d first been brought into the library. “I serve at your pleasure, or the likes of you at least. I sweat and toil for the scattering of shillings your kind is willing to throw at my feet for the simple labor I provide. I’m not complaining, you understand. It is the way of things. It’s the way it always is for those who are unwilling to change their circumstances.”
She crossed her arms, staying seated, and let a slippered foot tap impatiently on the carpet.
Marcus saw it and he started speaking quickly. “In here, it is different. In here, you are an initiate, and I am an adept — second rank. Here, you are the one who sweats and toils, and I am the one with currency to spend. My currency is secrets. To rise in the Feet of Seheht, you must learn our secrets. To learn more secrets, you must rise. Confusing, right? I can help you, Isisandra. I can guide you along this path, and all I ask—”
She held up a hand. “I know what you ask.”
He smiled and stood straight. “Shall we, then?”
“No,” she replied.
He frowned.
“Leave me alone, Marcus,” she instructed.
“Without a guide, a mentor, you won’t get far,” he warned. “In the future, my assistance may not be available, or perhaps it will cost you more.”
“I don’t wan
t your assistance,” she snapped.
“You’re not copying that book out of penance, are you?” he asked, his eyes falling to the crumbling pages on the desk behind her. “The masters assign that sometimes as a punishment. I thought that’s what you were doing. Most initiates can’t even read the script. But I was right. You’re here for the knowledge. You can read Darklands script and you know what you’re seeking.”
She didn’t respond.
Marcus waved his hand around the library. “Do you think the elder allows anything of value in this room? Anyone can walk in here. Even prospective members are allowed into this room. The maids dust in here, for spirits’ sake! No one reads these books, not the true knowledge seekers, at least.”
She sat quietly. She knew no one read the books, or the one sitting open behind her wouldn’t have been on the shelf. It held no great secrets of the underworld, but it told truth, and truth was power. But she also knew Marcus was right. This room was not where they kept the real knowledge. If she wanted to learn what they had to share… knowledge came at a price.
“I can help you,” drawled the man, leaning back on the chair back, shifting, trying to look casual.
“I’m thinking,” she said. She studied the man before finally agreeing, “You are right. I do seek knowledge. For the right knowledge, I would be very grateful. But only for the right knowledge.”
The man let his smile grow.
“What are you offering me?” she asked.
“Adepts have access to another library,” claimed Marcus, “one filled with useful texts, texts that would be far more interesting to someone like you.”
“And you will get these books for me?” she asked, allowing herself to lean forward slightly.
“I could if you show enough gratitude,” he responded coyly.
“Go get me one now,” she instructed.
He blinked at her.
“These robes are not very flattering,” she continued. “If you want to see what’s under them tonight, then go get me a book from the adept’s library right now. The more interesting the book is, the more I’ll let you do to me.”