by Joshua King
“They are getting orders from someone,” one of the voices said.
“The Shades say they got orders before the Prime disappeared. They haven’t heard from him since.”
“But they continue to go on missions. Groups of them have left each day. If they aren’t following direct orders from the Prime, what are they doing?”
“They were told to find Hayden and Aurora. They are continuing to follow that order.”
“There’s something else,” another voice said.
“What is it?”
“The dead from the fight on the train. They have been counted and recorded. Nearly all were killed with magical wounds, but several were decapitated.”
“Yes? That is what we expected.”
“That isn’t all.”
“What else?”
“They haven’t all been accounted for.”
“What do you mean?”
I glanced over at Jaxxim and saw him swallow, but his face didn’t change and I saw no fear in his eyes.
“One of the guards is missing. His body wasn’t counted among the dead and he hasn’t been found in any of the surrounding villages or realms.”
“Which guard?” the other asked after a tense silence.
“Jaxxim.”
“He needs to be found.”
The voices trailed off and we stayed still and silent for several seconds before easing out from behind the tapestry.
“They know you’re missing,” I said.
“I knew they would,” Jaxxim said. “Those were Council members. They are very careful to account for everyone in the Shades. But what’s more important is they don’t know where Darian is. That means he didn’t tell them when he was leaving or where he was going. This wasn’t planned, at least not to the extent that he shared it with his advisors.”
“Come on,” Aurora said. “We’re close to the portal. We don’t want to be around here any longer than we have to.”
We ran up the stairs and into a room outfitted like a small library. Aurora went to the mahogany desk and pulled the string on the green lamp sitting in one corner. The bulb lit up and one of the shelves slid out of the way.
“How very Clue,” I said.
“I don’t know what that means,” Aurora said. “But I’ll agree with you.”
She led us through the opening exposed by the shelves and she pressed a button to close the shelves behind us. We started down another set of stairs and I sighed.
“Is there a place in this palace we can get to without having to go up or down stairs? Aren’t there any just normal floors?”
“It’s an old building, Hayden.”
“I don’t know what that means,” I repeated her own words. “But I’ll agree with you.”
We got to the bottom of the short flight of steps and Aurora gestured to a tall, pointed door that looked like it should be on a church.
“Here it is,” she said.
I reached out and grabbed her arm before she could open the door.
“Wait,” I said. “What’s the price for going through?”
“Just having to know you’re walking in Darian’s footsteps,” she said.
“That’s pretty steep.” I pulled her in for a kiss. “But we’ll make it worth it.”
9
"Oh, shit."
I had gotten to the point where hearing those words wasn't all that unexpected, but that didn't mean them coming out of Aurora's mouth when she opened the door wasn't unpleasant.
"What's wrong?" I asked.
All it took was leaning to the side and looking through the door to see exactly what had inspired the mutter. There was nothing past the door. Just like in Final View where the door that once led into Malakan's stone chambers now opened to nothing but a smooth stone wall, opening the door to the portal revealed nothing but the wall. It looked like someone had attached a door frame and door onto the wall for a confusing decoration.
"What the hell is going on?" Aurora asked.
"The door in Final View is the same. Malakan did this," I said, touching my hand to the smooth surface.
"Why would he do that?" Aurora asked. "If he wants us to get to him, why is he doing things that are going to make it impossible for us to find him?"
"That's not what he meant to do. Remember, this isn't the way he intended us to get to him. He left very careful instructions, and he expected us to follow them step by step. Blocking off the tunnels was a way to prevent other people from going into his space. He doesn't know what happened or that we need to be able to get in."
"So, what do we do now? If you honestly believe going through that hidden entrance in his reflected realm is what's going to get us back on track, we have to get in there. But this is the only other way we can access the stone chambers. Like you said, the door in final view is sealed, so we have to go through this entrance."
"It's sealed, but that doesn't mean we can't use it. I suggest you all step back."
Having obviously learned from past experienced, the group scrambled back several steps to get as far out of the way as they could. I stepped into place in front of the sealed-off portal and directed my hands toward it. Focusing all my energy into the center of my chest, I directed it forward and created a concentrated blast of magic to shoot directly into the wall. I wasn’t entirely sure what was going to happen. It was possible whatever enchantment Malakan used to seal the portal had created a surface that would simply reflect the magic back at me. While I knew my magic couldn’t kill me, it didn’t seem likely that would be a fun experience if it happened. With that uncertainty hanging over me, I did what any logical person does when they are faced with the potential for severe injury. I closed my eyes. Once fully protected by the what I can’t see can’t possibly hurt me clause, I let the magic fly.
The sound of the explosion was deafening, but the feeling of debris bouncing off me was reassuring. When the sound lessened, I opened my eyes to check. The wall was standing open with a jagged hole that let me see a large space beyond. The rest of the group walked up behind me as I ducked through the hole.
“It worked,” I said. “Aurora, where is the portal? How do we use it?”
“Just walk,” she said. “It’s a passage, a specially designed portal that lets you go through it just by encountering it rather than having to do anything special.”
“Like the one from the bridge,” I said.
“The bridge?” Aurora asked.
“He knows what he’s talking about,” Bugs said. “Sucks you right up. Even if you don’t want it to.”
I glanced over my shoulder at Aurora and saw her staring back at me with an expression on her face that said she didn’t know what I was talking about and wasn’t sure she wanted to. I’d saved time when Bugs and I got back to Nakatomi Tower by trimming down the story of getting him to not include me jumping off the bridge. Now didn’t seem like the opportunity to flesh it out.
“So, we just walk?” I asked, smoothing over the rest of the conversation.
“Yes.”
“I can do that.”
I headed down the corridor in front of me and the rest of the group fell into step behind me. My body was tense with expectation as I moved into the darkness. The feeling of going through the portal at the bottom of the river was obvious and I didn’t relish the idea of going through it again. Much like my distaste for blood I had finally overcome, my dislike of going through the portals was something I was going to need to hurry up and get through. It seemed like there would be a lot of that form of transportation in my future and it was going to suck if I had to dread it every time.
Apparently either my focus on waiting for the feeling had distracted me enough to miss it, or this passage was one of the kinder portals, because after only a brief walk down the passage, I saw another door in front of us. The rest of the hallway had been completely dark, but the door was visible with a glow that emanated from the door itself.
“Go ahead,” Aurora said.
I reached f
or the handle and opened the door, expecting it to lead to another solid wall, but was pleasantly surprised when it actually opened into another open space.
“He didn’t seal this one,” I said.
“I guess he decided not being able to access it from the other end was probably enough,” Aurora said. “He was entrenched in faking his own death, highlighting a conspiracy, and designing a hunt for you. There probably wasn’t a whole lot of time available to waste on sealing up every possible entrance.”
“You are extraordinarily sassy, did you know that?” I asked.
She grinned at me and gave me a playful push toward the door. It was dark when I walked into the room, but digging around in my bag produced a flashlight. The beam cut through the darkness and I knew we’d made it back in the stone chambers. It didn’t seem like an appropriate moment to make celebratory, but I had the urge to give a little cheer. Something had finally unfolded the way I wanted it to and considering how infrequently that happened in recent times, I wasn’t going to take it for granted. I moved out of the way to let the rest of the group come into the room with me. Bugs brought up the tail of the stream, his head turning in every direction as his eyes took in the stone walls and gray floor. It was a room I didn’t distinctly remember, but it looked like one of the spaces Malakan brought me through when hurrying me toward the house to do the ritual that showed me my past, present, and future.
“Bugs?” I asked. “Is something wrong?”
He kept looking for a few more seconds before looking at me.
“I know this place,” he said.
“You do?” I was surprised by the answer. “You’ve been in here before? I thought you didn’t know Malakan.”
“I told you that, didn’t I?” He gave a mirthless laugh. “I’m good at hiding things. That’s what got me into this, I guess.”
“What do you mean?”
“I told you about the men I was working for when I was still in the other world.”
“Yeah. You said they had you doing things you didn’t like, but you didn’t know why, and then when you found out, you had to turn them into the police. Which they didn’t like.”
“Yep. That gets to the core of it.”
“How did that get you here, though?” Ashe asked.
“I got in over my head. Everything they had me doing was weighing heavy on me, but I was in too deep. Just walking away from it would have been wrong, but it also felt like it would make me too vulnerable. The only thing I could do was let the authorities know what was going on and hope they would be able to fix it for me. I’d heard of plenty of people who’d turned informer and got to go have a new name and new life while the bad dudes headed to jail. That was the goal. Turn them in. Tell the police everything I knew. Slap on a hat, change my name to Hiram, and become a farmer. It was going to work out fine. Until it didn’t.”
“Because one of them figured out what you’d done.”
“Yep. Turns out police don’t work nearly as fast or as clean as I’d like to think. Rather than taking my word for it and shuffling me off somewhere they couldn’t find me, they thanked me for the information and promised to look into it. Seems part of looking into it was telling the bad dudes I’d been to visit.”
“Then you had to go away,” I said.
Bugs nodded and lifted his bare foot.
“They attached a piece of cement to my foot and tossed me over the side of the bridge. Pretty efficient way of keeping someone quiet, I admit. I might have been the first person they had done that to, though, because they didn’t think through the cement part terribly well. It yanked me down hard, then tore my shoe right off my foot. I still ended up down at the bottom and the portal got me, but I was able to make my way up to the surface. It wasn’t under my own power. More of a cork bobbing around situation.”
“You survived that?” I asked.
“Just barely. Malakan dragged me out of the water and brought me here. I was alive, but only had a few seconds left in me. He froze my life where it was. Those few seconds of life are still left in me, but they’re locked where they are.”
“What does that mean?”
“I don’t know exactly. The mage saved my life in that he kept me living when I should have been breathing my last breath, but I don’t know what that means for me exactly. Hayden, you asked me if I’m a vampire and I said I was something else. I know that’s true, but I don’t know the rest of the answer. I’m not a vampire, but I don’t know what I am or how long I’ll be that. I’m stuck in some strange limbo of an existence and I don’t know how long it’s going to last or what might end it. Malakan never told me what all this meant for me other than that I was alive. He didn’t tell me how long I’d live or if there was something that could counteract what he did and kick off those few seconds left again. There might be something that could kill me, or he might have frozen it for good and I’ll just keep banging around until it’s nothing but me, the Twinkies, and the bloodsuckers…no offense.”
“It’s fine. I’m a Swiss Roll man myself, but I can get down with a Twinkie.”
Bugs gave me a crooked smile.
“You told us Darian tried to recruit you into being one of the Shades and that he kept sending the guards to you. Why didn’t he command them to change you? He could have had one of them bite you and force you into being one of his followers,” Aurora pointed out.
“He did,” Bugs told her. “It wasn’t a particularly elegant approach. After I’d turned down the first few who tried to appeal to me with logic and anecdotes and even one pretty well-designed brochure, another jumped out at me, tackled me, and tried to bite.”
“Tried to bite?”
“Yeah. He poked his fangs out and went for my neck, but they wouldn’t go through. My skin just…stopped them. I thought maybe Malakan had given me some sort of special shell, like the hard candy coating that keeps the chocolate safe. But trying to climb into one of the trash can fires to rescue back a half a paperback one of the residents had thrown in to spite someone else quickly proved me wrong.”
“So, you can still be hurt?”
“By some things apparently. Never anything too serious. Cuts, scrapes, burns. Some of them have hurt like a bitch, but they haven’t done extensive damage and I’m still kicking. I just have no idea for how long.”
“You’re essentially living through the last few seconds of your life over and over again, just waiting for something to kill you?” I asked, horrified by the fear and heaviness that must pull on him all the time.
“Yep. And I never got my shoe back from the river.”
10
Ashe and Stephana reached into their bags and pulled out their own flashlights, illuminating the space more so we could see everything around us. There was nothing that immediately stood out as different from the last time I’d been here. I hadn’t spent much time in there when Malakan led me through the area, but it was a small enough room that any major changes would have been evident. Instead, it looked as though Malakan had walked out of the room only a few moments before and would either be right back or was just outside, waiting for us. Even though I knew that wasn’t the case, there was still a part of me that felt hopeful anticipation that we might be close to the mage. Maybe he had crafted this all as another ploy. All along he intended for each step that had happened so it would bring us here. The hope was completely in vain. I knew it, but that didn’t stop me from piecing together what I was going to say to Malakan when we found him sitting in his big chair and laughing his way through a cup of tea.
It was creative and borderline scathing, but I didn’t get a chance to say it. We walked out of the room and into the next and found it just as empty as the one before. It was still and quiet without even the hint of muffled laughter from a warlock hiding behind a tapestry or stuffed in a cabinet ready to jump out at us with a handful of confetti to congratulate me on getting through my Sanctification and becoming ArchWarlock.
“What is that look?” Stephana asked.
“I don’t think it’s going to work out that way,” she said.
“Yeah, he’s always wearing that robe thing around and I’ve never seen it with any pockets or anything. Where would he keep the confetti?” Bugs asked.
I wondered just how much of the bottom of the river was still wedged in his brain. Then it occurred to me. Bugs was living in the last seconds of his life, the seconds when he was so close to drowning and his brain was starved for oxygen. Suddenly, he made more sense.
“That’s a great thought and all, Hayden, but I don’t think it’s going to be that easy. There’s a reason the Sanctification usually takes a year,” Aurora said.
“I am fully aware of that, but you could have given me like five seconds of denial.”
“All right. Go ahead.”
I tried to bring myself back into the image of Malakan’s celebration for me, but it wouldn’t come back.