Lord of Secrets

by Breanna Teintze

  ‘Don’t thank me,’ I muttered. She wasn’t unhurt. The knuckles on the hand I’d held were scraped and bloody. I gave her back the lamp; if we got separated, she would need it more than I. ‘We need to keep going. There’s probably more of them, and we’re making a lot of noise.’

  The momentary relief on her face fled. ‘More?’ Brix’s voice dropped to a whisper. ‘What in the hells was it?’

  ‘It is – was – a creatlach.’ I touched the bones with my foot, wishing there was a way to explain without speaking. ‘It’s . . . a pet, sort of. A tool. Necromancers make them. It’s like making a doll – you can build with any bones, put together in any configuration you want and bound together with magic. But things with soft tissue are more difficult, and delicate. That’s why this one didn’t have any eyes.’ I uncurled my fingers and looked down at the nameplate I held. It had once been something’s shoulder blade. Now it was covered with tiny, carefully painted runes, spirals within spirals. ‘So it tried to guess where we were based on vibration, like footsteps or speech. I was invisible to it as long as I didn’t say anything or take a step. When you came up beside me, it found you.’

  ‘Nameplate,’ Lorican said, hardly audible. ‘That’s what you meant, took its name away.’

  I held it up. ‘It has the name of the creature and the wizard written on it. Otherwise the creator couldn’t get absolute obedience, and even wizards aren’t mad enough to make constructs they can’t control. Pull it away from the rest of the construct and it comes apart.’ The runes on the nameplate were just as archaic as the ones on the arch, but once you got through the old-fashioned flourishes and curls, it was simple enough to read:

  Spindlejoint.

  Like I said, whoever made it must have been a creative soul. A bit of a poet, too, apparently.

  I scanned the incantation to find the name of the wizard. I half expected it to be Keir Esras. I had seen him in the city above us, and I knew he’d been hunting necromancers and studying their practice. He would have had to keep his activities secret. A position as Examiner General, where he could control any internal Guild investigation, would have been perfect. He and his ambitions towards the throne could have been the reason Acarius was here last year, and Lorican had said there was another way down to Deeptown, a door in the Spires. A lot more of this situation would make sense if the bastard turned out to be playing with death-magic himself.

  But my speculation stumbled to a halt when I read the wizard’s name:

  Jaern.

  Which made no sense at all. How had the incantation worked, if the creature was just dedicated to the god? Even if there was a mad priest of Jaern down here, he should have had to use his own name. Something was very wrong.

  ‘But how do you know there are more?’ Brix’s taut voice yanked me out of my thoughts.

  ‘No necromancer I’ve ever seen stopped after one.’ I glanced at Lorican. ‘There are more, aren’t there? You’ve seen them?’

  ‘Maybe ten,’ he said, a grim set to his mouth. ‘This is worse than I thought it would be, worse than it was last time. And you’re right, we should keep moving.’

  ‘I need to scribe a spell,’ I said. ‘Bring the lamp over here. I’ll be quick.’

  My hand trembled, though. It took me three tries to get the first line of runes, the ones across my belly, scribed perfectly. Lorican held the lamp, watched me work and didn’t say anything. I remembered sniping at him about fear earlier, and I couldn’t look up at him. It wouldn’t have been practical, I suppose, for him to risk talking to mock me in return – still, it would have felt better than standing there with the taste of shame in my mouth.

  We moved forwards, but slowly. We all realised that we couldn’t run without advertising our presence. It was dangerous enough just walking.

  I caught myself holding my breath, over and over, listening for a scratch, a click of bones, anything to tell me where the next threat would come from. I forced myself to inhale and exhale as we proceeded, agonisingly slowly. If I could concentrate on breathing, maybe I could fight the ball of mindless panic slamming in my chest.

  Scrape.

  We all stopped. I strained to find the sound’s origin, to analyse it, get some scrap of information to tell me what I was dealing with. I had to figure out what was going on. There had to be some logical way that the necromancer was controlling the beasts. If only I could find the solution, I could do something.

  But there was nothing more, just the dense, unbroken curtain of night outside our fragile circle of yellow light. Everything was too silent.

  Inhale, exhale.

  Lorican started moving again, placing his feet gingerly. Brix and I followed, both of us walking on our toes. After a while I realised that Lorican was following some sort of path carved into the rock floor, a string of pictographs. I tried to study them while also watching the darkness around us. It was a fruitless occupation, but one I couldn’t pull myself away from. My body twitched with dread, as though it knew something was there, stalking us.

  Inhale. My inner voice grew more stern as my heart hammered louder in my ears. Exhale.

  The pictographs must have been intended as a kind of map for pilgrims. The symbol of the half-closed eye repeated at regular intervals, mingled with a number of other religious themes. Finally, the path terminated in a set of glossy black stairs, slick and startling against the gritty white rock that the rest of the cavern was made of.

  Lorican halted at the foot of the stairs and glanced back at me. ‘The temple door is just up these steps,’ he whispered. ‘They’re slippery, so—’

  He froze, eyes fixed on something the lamplight had revealed over my shoulder.

  Scrape.

  It was behind me.

  The stink of graveyard rot was worse this time. I raised myself on to my toes and risked a half-turn, the syllables of the concussion spell already forming on my tongue.

  A ring of sightless eyes stared back at me, stretching away into the dark, makeshift heads grinning atop hulking bodies. No two of them were the same. There were more spider-legged abominations, and others that were dog-shaped and crab-shaped, variation upon variation. The one that had slithered its way up to me was nothing but a string of skulls, tied together with vertebrae. It swayed back and forth like a cobra, hypnotic, listening for the two people behind me.

  Fifty. The analytical part of my mind insisted on accuracy. There were at least fifty of them. My spell wouldn’t do anything but delay them for a moment.

  On the other hand, the spell had twenty-eight syllables, and we were close to the temple entrance. The sound of the incantation – not to mention the shock from when it hit the monsters – should draw the beasties towards me. Perhaps there was a gate or door of some sort Brix and Lorican could get behind and close, barricade. It was at least a chance.

  ‘What’s your name, ugly?’ I said.

  The snake stopped dancing in front of me, all of its skulls rotating so the eye sockets faced me. The topmost head chattered its jaw, almost conversationally. One of its teeth fell out and rolled across the floor, coming to rest against the toe of my boot.

  I raised my hand to shoulder height and swallowed down the bile that kept rising. There was nothing else for it. The spell should buy Brix and Lorican enough time to get to safety.

  Inhale.

  Twenty-eight syllables.

  I opened my mouth.

  A cloud of beads flew into the crowd of monsters, and they exploded into a mass of writhing, creaking activity. Lorican shouted, ‘Go!’

  Brix grabbed my elbow, wrenched me around and dragged me with her.

  And then we were scrambling up the chipped, slippery steps, fighting for every bit of footing. At the top of the stairs glowed clumps of green fungus, huge mushrooms surrounding a narrow door.

  One of the creatures snapped at me from the side, so close its teeth scraped across my trousers. It looked like a surreal mixture of a cat and a lizard. I shouted the runes on my belly, and a blast of red f
orce pulsed from my open hand. The creature made a strange noise between a whimper and a hiss as the spell smashed into its snout and threw it backwards.

  The counter-force of the spell – the downside to concussion magic, alas – threw me forwards.

  Brix stumbled ahead of me. I couldn’t slow myself and was about to land on top of her. There was no time to think. I put my hands on either side of her waist and yanked her back up to her feet.

  ‘Gray—’ She said my name in a little gust like a sob. We were nearly to the top of the steps, where Lorican stood swinging his lamp in a wide arc and pitching handfuls of beads every few moments, keeping the creatures at bay. Brix’s lamp wobbled.

  ‘You’re all right.’ I forced us both up the stairs. ‘Hang on to the light.’

  We finally cleared the last step as claws tore at the back of my left calf, and my brace twisted. There was no time to turn and aim a spell, no time for anything but to keep running.

  Lorican stood just outside the doorway, only a few steps from us. The black wall on either side of the narrow opening was smooth and shiny as glass.

  ‘Come on!’ he shouted.

  The brace flopped on my shin, but we were almost there. My toes found purchase and I shoved Brix towards the doorway, pushing with my legs.

  Something inside my knee ripped. Blazing, brilliant agony exploded, emptying me of everything else. I screamed.

  There was no stopping the momentum I’d already bought. I fell through the doorway, sweeping Brix and Lorican along with me. We all landed inside the passage, in a heap, the lamps skidding away across the floor. I rolled sideways.

  Part of the floor under my elbow moved.

  Click.

  I pulled away, but it was too late. Before I could even sit up, a barred gate slid smoothly into place in the doorway, between us and the creatlaches.

  ‘We’re safe,’ Brix said.

  But the flickers of lamplight revealed a string of white-painted sigils around the doorway. Even though I could only make out about every third word, it was enough.

  ‘We’re not safe,’ I said. ‘We’re trapped.’

  Eleven

  Brix sprawled beside me, dishevelled and pale against the obsidian tiles under her. She got shakily to her elbows and then sat up, pushing her hair back with one hand, her eyes on the narrow doorway. ‘What do you mean? They can’t get in, can they?’

  Slender limbs reached through the barred gate, tapping, testing the strength of the iron. A chorus of uncanny creaks told us the creatures weren’t happy about losing their prey.

  ‘Probably not.’ My fingers traced the floor until I found the tiny seams. I pushed. The tile didn’t sink any more than it already had. ‘But I triggered the gate to close by landing on a pressure plate. It doesn’t move anymore, which means the action to open the gate is elsewhere.’ Outside, for instance. ‘Unless we can figure out how to get those bars up again, we’re stuck in here.’

  ‘Well.’ Lorican picked himself up and moved to the doorway with one of the lamps, examining the bars from a safe distance. ‘At least it will give us a minute to think.’

  Brix frowned at me. ‘You’re hurt.’

  ‘One of the bastards tore my brace.’ I stretched forwards, wincing as the tendons lengthened along the back of my leg. The straps of the brace were beyond repair, sheared through in places. I had to work quickly, before the nervous energy from the flight left me and the pain became overwhelming. ‘Bring a lamp over here and I’ll scribe a numbing spell.’

  Brix grabbed the other lamp and swung it towards me. Another wash of pain swept over my body, the cuts on my arm and back throbbing in time to the all-encompassing fire in my knee.

  I dug out my paints and began scribing on the brace. Most spells take a good bit of concentration, but I’ve been using that numbing agent since I was twelve years old. I could scribe it sleepwalking.

  Except I couldn’t. I was shaking too hard, panting. It wasn’t just the pain; the residue of the terror I had managed to fight while we were in the cavern had me by the throat. I was half-blind with it.

  ‘It’s bad, isn’t it?’ Brix said.

  ‘Yes.’ Even my voice was shaking, dammit. ‘Talk to me, Brix. About something normal. Distract me.’

  She stared at me, then swallowed. ‘You should know better than to expect me to talk about something normal. The closest I can get is to tell you about my sister, I suppose.’

  By gripping the brush very tightly, I managed to get the first character down. ‘Sister. Just one?’

  ‘Just one.’ She leaned closer and put a hand on my elbow. The stink of decay that the creatlaches had left in my nostrils faded, replaced by a hint of whatever soap she’d used back at the tavern. Something fragranced with sandalwood. ‘It’s just me and her. You’ve never told me whether you have siblings . . . or anybody.’

  ‘Only Acarius.’ I wrote a few more runes. ‘Nobody else.’

  ‘Well, you have to understand that I used to be tender-hearted.’ She watched my work. With every word her voice grew calmer. Even though I knew the calm was fake, it took some of the edge off. ‘My baby sister is one of those girls who knocks everyone sideways. She looks like the new moon, all golden and sharp and smarter than people think she will be. She’s got a chipped tooth from this time she got in a fight with a boy over some stray kittens.’ Brix touched her own front incisor with one fingertip. ‘We used to steal my aunt’s rabbit-skin blanket and sneak out in the winter to cover up our old brown nanny-goat. I’d sing lullabies to her, and she’d sing them to the goat.’ She smiled faintly. ‘Anka still has a tender heart.’

  I wanted to ask where Anka was, given that Brix had been clawing her way out of a temple, but I began the curve of the rune spiral instead. I had to get it done before the pain overwhelmed me completely, had to save my concentration for the spell.

  ‘At any rate, one time the goat got out,’ Brix said. ‘She followed us, with the rabbit-skin blanket on her back. And my aunt saw it and thought a bear cub had escaped from a circus or something and got into the house. She squawked like a hen.’

  ‘Circus? Not a house in the sticks, then.’ My voice sounded a little better now. The spell was almost finished.

  ‘No,’ she said, slowly. ‘A house in the middle of a great city. Genereth, where my family’s from. The mother-city, where the Tirnaal first became a people. Maybe I’ll take you there someday, show you the red domes on the buildings, and the waterwheels and the silk-dyers’ workshops. It’s warm there.’ She pulled a lock of my hair out of my eyes, her hand brushing against my forehead. ‘If you’d travel with me that far.’

  ‘It’s a deal.’ If we ever got out of this damn temple, all I had to show her was a little cabin and a stack of old books. At least the distraction had worked. I pronounced the runes I had scribed, waiting for the cold feeling of the spell to seep into my knee. The numbness took hold, but it didn’t blot out the pain with its usual totality. Something was drastically wrong inside the joint.

  Lorican gave up on the gate and walked back to us. ‘You did more than sprain it, didn’t you?’

  ‘Maybe. I don’t know.’ I did know, but sitting around worrying about ruined joints wasn’t going to do any good. Since we were stuck in a hallway, in a cave, my knee could end up being somewhat irrelevant.

  The lamplight revealed writing on the black walls around us, mingled with odd, narrow pictographs. Once the paint outlining the letters had been white; now it was a ghostly grey. The language was, of course, the same difficult-to-read, archaic mess that had been on the arch and on the nameplate. But these weren’t incantory runes – it was just writing, not magic. None of my education could help me interpret it.

  ‘What is it?’ Lorican looked from me to the characters I was staring at. ‘What does it mean?’

  ‘I think it must be instructions,’ I said. ‘But I can’t read it like this. Brix.’ I got out my box of paint and selected the vial of silver paint. I handed it and the brush to her.

&n
bsp; ‘Instructions for what?’ Lorican said.

  ‘Pilgrims,’ I said. ‘A kind of a test, a way to soften up worshippers before you shake them down.’ I smiled at Brix in what I hoped was an encouraging fashion. ‘I need you to scribe something on me, here.’ I shoved my hair back and pointed to the tender place behind my ear.

  ‘I can’t scribe magic.’ Brix held the paints out to me. She did not look encouraged.

  ‘Just watch me and copy,’ I said, without taking them.

  ‘Gray, if one little line is wrong, you could be hurt.’

  ‘I’m already hurt.’ I blew air out through my nose, and fought to make my tone reassuring instead of desperate. ‘Look, magic is a trade, something you learn. It’s just paying attention. The runes have to be written near my ear, the same as the breaker I did on you to get rid of your navel ring had to be around your stomach. I can’t do it myself without a mirror. The incantation won’t hurt you because you’re not going to pronounce it – I am. And it won’t hurt me because it’s an easy spell and you’re going to do fine.’

  She bit her lip, but she dipped the paintbrush. I pushed my hair out of the way again and was thankful that for once she believed me when I lied to her. I hadn’t worked out how to incorporate the shielding runes for translation spells yet; this was going to hurt me. It couldn’t be helped.

  By this time, it was no surprise that she was a quick study. I traced a rune in the dust on the floor, waited for her to transcribe it behind my ear and then traced the next. It only took a few minutes to get the entire spell done. I rubbed out what I’d written in the dust, steeled myself and pronounced Brix’s runes.

  The magic razored across my skull, so sharp that it took me a blink to realise that it had worked. The gibberish on the wall rearranged itself into words I could read. But when I tried to get up to examine it more closely, my numbed leg wouldn’t cooperate.

  Lorican held out a hand. ‘Up you come, brat.’

  I had to let him haul me up on to my feet, flinching when the muscles of my back bunched under the cut the bone-spider had given me. I was steady enough to stand by myself, though, once I put my weight on my good leg.