The Secret Texts

by Holly Lisle

  He nodded. He breathed fast, and she could hear his heart racing. “Where’s your treasury?”

  He mumbled something, but of course with her hand over his mouth it didn’t come out clearly. She said, “Point.”

  He pointed down the stairs.

  “Take me.”

  He went. Funny how he didn’t sigh constantly anymore. Maybe he was no longer sleepy. The stairway ended in a metal-ribbed stonewood door. The door had no latch and no handle, no keyhole and no window. She knew of such doors—Galweigh House’s treasury had one just like this one. The person who opened the door had to slide fingers into the correct series of holes and push the latches aside. Pushing even one wrong latch released the knife mechanism that neatly cut off every one of the fingers just below the knuckle. Very effective at keeping people out, those doors.

  “Open it,” Kait said.

  “Mmmm mmaaaahhh,” Fifer said, shaking his head.

  Kait pressed the edge of the dagger against his neck hard enough to blanch the skin. “You can’t? Of course you can. Or, at least, let’s hope that you can. I can’t let you go or you’ll make noise or run for help. If I have to deal with the door, I’ll need both my hands free, and I’ll have to kill you first in order to have them free. Then I’d still have to cut off your hands so I could have something to push into the holes, because I’m not going to use my own fingers. I would rather not kill you—I would rather not have to kill anyone . . . else. But if it comes down to you or me, cousin, you need not ask which way the bones will fall.”

  She tightened her grip again, and he groaned.

  “You going to do what I tell you?”

  He nodded.

  “Then do it.”

  He rested his hands along either side of the door, and slid each finger slowly into one of the depressions. He took his time, and Kait didn’t hurry him—while she knew the combination to her father’s treasury door, she wouldn’t want to have to stick her fingers into it in a hurry, either.

  Fifer swallowed so hard his body shook, and pushed the levers simultaneously, and after an instant Kait heard a click from inside the wall. Fifer removed his hands, and the door rolled silently into the left wall.

  Kait stepped on the heel of Fifer’s right boot and said, “Pull your foot out of it . . . slowly.”

  He wriggled a little, but removed the boot. Kait shoved it into the opening, right against the groove where the door would slide when it closed. Then she forced her cousin into the treasury.

  As soon as they stepped across, the vault door slammed closed behind them, but it didn’t close all the way, thanks to the boot. The insides of treasury doors required a different combination, and Kait didn’t want to take her cousin back out of the vault with her. As long as the door remained wedged open, she wouldn’t have to.

  They stood to one side of a wonderland where neatly sorted jewels in glass cases rose from floor to ceiling, and stacks of bars of precious metals towered so high and so wide they created walls of their own, and banks of wooden drawers lined one wall, while beautiful embroidered silks and stacks of Ancients’ books and carvings in ebony and amber and ivory sat collecting dust on shelves along another. “This is very easy,” Kait said. “I need money, and not even very much.”

  Fifer pointed to the wooden drawers.

  “Fine.” She marched him in the opposite direction. The shelf that housed the embroidered silks had ceremonial robes folded to one side—and the ceremonial robes came with belts. She pushed Fifer to the floor, drew her sword, sheathed her dagger, and took a couple of the belts. As soon as he was tied and gagged, she hurried over to the drawers.

  The wealth of a small nation lay within them. Coins of gold and silver lay in heaps and piles, sorted by denomination and issuing mint: gleaming hexagonal Dokteerak daks; tree-stamped Sabir farnes; Masschanka robans; Kairn slaudes; Galweigh preids; and from outside the realms of the Five Families, monies from the Strithian empire, the Manarkan Territories, and places unknown to Kait—monies stamped with the visages of the Scarred and their world. Enough money lay in those drawers to let her raise an army of mercenaries a thousand times over. She would hire from the colonies if possible, from allies if available. From foreigners if necessary.

  Don’t waste your time trying to find mercenaries, Amalee said. I’m telling you, the Family is dead. But you can bring them back.

  “From the dead?” Kait blurted.

  I know of an Ancient artifact that will let you . . . ah, resurrect them.

  “From the dead.” She recalled Dùghall’s amused speculation about the existence of such an artifact—the Mirror of Souls—and his comment that its existence was almost certainly a myth.

  He was wrong. The Mirror of Souls exists, and it works. Get enough money to hire a ship and a crew that can sail you north and east across the ocean, and I will take you to it. You want to help our Family, then get the Mirror.

  North and east would take her across the Bregian Ocean. Few ships made that crossing, and the lands on the other side were mostly unexplored.

  But if her ancestor was right and she had a chance to bring her Family back . . .

  Her Family. The Family that she’d believed so much better than the Sabirs or the Dokteeraks, the Kairns or the Masschankas. Her Family, with an uncle who had turned on her as quickly as that Dokteerak paraglese had turned on his relative—and for what? Because she stood in the way of his ascension to Galweigh House. And more power. And more wealth.

  She’d always been told, and had always believed, that loyalty among Family members came above everything else—that it was the very essence of what being Family meant.

  She sagged against the wall, for the moment all the fight gone out of her. She felt tears start down her cheeks; she tasted their salt, and remembered her mother’s warm arms around her when she’d cut herself. Remembered the comfort of her father’s voice, calming her down and helping her find her way to her humanity when, Shifted into Karnee form, she had to hide away in the dark places in the House, after they first moved there from their country home. She’d been so afraid then. Afraid that someone would see her, discover her secret, kill her as that child in Halles had been killed. But her parents had saved her. Over and over, they had saved her life. And her brothers and sisters had helped her, and she had survived to earn the chance to repay them.

  Except she was too late.

  No way to repay the dead. If she listened to Amalee, she would only be deluding herself. At best, the Mirror of Souls was a thousand years lost, and irretrievable. At worst, it was a myth. The Sabirs and their treachery were real. The Goft Galweighs and their treachery were real, too. And she couldn’t even get her revenge on the bastards who’d destroyed everything she had ever loved in the world, because the surviving members of her Family would pay the spawn of evil their own souls to feed their lust for Galweigh House and the power it represented, and the treasure it housed.

  All her life, her Family had been everything to her, because she’d been so sure the Galweigh name was synonymous with everything which was good, and just, and right in the world. She’d been wrong to believe. There was, she discovered, Family—which was a political thing and knew no loyalty—and family, which was a thing of blood ties and love, and for which she would gladly have given her life.

  And if the only chance you have is a bad chance, is that not still better than having no chance at all? Is it, Kait? Think, girl. If the Mirror of Souls is lost forever, you have lost nothing that you had not already lost. But if it exists, and if you can find it, you will regain something you could have in no other way.

  Kait stood straight and brushed her tears from her cheeks with one sleeve. She would have given her life for any of her family. She would still give her life. For even the slender chance that she might see her mother and father alive again, and her brothers and sisters. . . . If she could hold on to the hope that her uncle Dùghall would once again tell her his bawdy islander jokes and quote his obscure philosophers . . . if she could
even dream that one day beloved Galweigh voices might ring again through the halls of the House . . . for that, she would sail the almost-uncharted ocean, trek across the wastes of Scarred lands. For the lives of those she loved, she would risk everything.

  Maybe she couldn’t believe in Family anymore. But she would never stop loving her family.

  The muscles of Kait’s jaw clenched so tight they burned. If she wanted the chance, she had to act. Fast. She started filling a small leather bag with gold. She attached one bag of gold to the belt beneath her tunic, and started on a second.

  Good girl. I knew I could count on you. Now, then, once you get your money, steal one of those books on the shelf—the older, the better—and flee this place. When you’re safe, and we’ve told some greedy captain the lie that will get you berth and allies in finding the Mirror, I’ll give you the proofs you want about me. Only get to safety first.

  She filled and hid the second purse. Then she dumped a handful of silver coins and a few bronzes into her pockets—a woman who showed gold in the wrong places wouldn’t live long.

  Finally, she dug through the Ancient books until she found one so old she couldn’t even recognize the letter forms.

  That one will do.

  Kait didn’t know why she would need it, but better to have and not want than to want and not have, as Wain Pertrad wrote. When she had what she needed, she mockingly saluted her cousin and fled.

  * * *

  Dùghall’s spell spun itself into life. Down in the black heart of the silent House, the bodies of the dead Wolves glowed, casting light in their secret chamber—a chamber which would afterward be undisturbed by light for long years. Their radiance cast amorphous, shifting shadows, then dispelled all shadows in a burst of brilliance that seemed to destroy all darkness. But the bodies, devoured entirely by the spirits of the dead, disappeared without a trace of dust or ash, as if they had never been. And darkness claimed the room once more for its own.

  In other rooms in the dark labyrinth between the main House, long-forgotten victims of violence, scattered suicides, and two small children who had wandered too far and never found their way back to the realm of daylight before starving cast their own small shadows before disappearing. Rats and cats and mice and snakes who had found dark corners in which to die sparkled like stars for an instant, then were gone forever. The meat in the House’s cold room vanished in like manner, as did food left uneaten that waited in the trash bins for disposal. The graves of the dead Galweighs in the Family boneyard lit up inside, though no one could see. And out on the grounds proper, the embers of the fire that had burned the dead glowed more brightly for a moment. And two brilliant lights out on the landing field where the airible had waited showed that it had escaped, before ensuring that the fate of the two men who had been guarding it would never be known.

  When the last of the lights died away, an instant’s hush fell over Galweigh House. The guards and soldiers and officers looked at each other, words lost to them. And in that hush, the spirits of the dead reached out and touched the living.

  * * *

  Trev leaned against the stone wall in the hallway, staring at the door his searching had revealed. The passageway behind it led into darkness, a blackness that his lamp refused to illumine. His skin twitched as if touched by a thousand cobwebs, and sweat dripped from his forehead down his nose and beaded on his upper lip. An instant before, he’d seen the reflection of pale red light from beyond the point where the passageway twisted; in the instant that his eyes had registered it, it had vanished.

  Something waited down there. Something bad, that knew he existed, and that now hid in the darkness, waiting for him to move into reach.

  Why go on? Ry’s woman wasn’t in the House anymore—Trev would almost have staked his life on it. After Ry had that seizure, he’d volunteered to stay behind to look for her, but the longer and harder he looked, the more certain he became that she was nowhere in reach. Why keep looking? He couldn’t say. Maybe secretly he wanted to earn more of Ry’s admiration, or to take Yanth’s place as his closest confidant. Maybe underneath everything, he hoped for advancement as Ry advanced in the Family. Though he despised such base motives in others, he had to admit they compelled him as much as friendship for Ry. Maybe more.

  The darkness ahead of him seemed to deepen, to gain weight and presence, and Trev swallowed hard. He wouldn’t live in Galweigh House if the Sabirs made him paraglese of it. The damned place felt alive to him, as if it were watching every step he took.

  You can’t take her home with you even if you do find her, he told himself. You try, and she’ll Shift and slaughter you.

  The darkness began to whisper.

  Sibilant almost-formed words caught at the edge of Trev’s hearing. Pattering in the blackness, and dry squeaks, as if rats, pressed to dust by the weight of the thick dark, came at him to protest their fate. A draft of dank air brushed his cheek, and he stepped back, away from the door, caught off guard by the faint, unpleasant carrion reek it carried.

  Wait, the darkness whispered, and he didn’t know if he heard the word or only imagined it.

  She wouldn’t be in there.

  He closed the door and slowly backed away, keeping his back to the wall so that no one would surprise him. His lamp cast long and dancing shadows, and he wished that dawn would come and chase them away. Whispering began behind him. He spun and squinted into the dark. Saw nothing. Heard the door he had closed open behind him. Jerked around, sword raised, lantern lifted so that he could make out the outline of his enemy.

  Saw nothing.

  But the carrion smell bore down on him, a moving wall. Nothing in front of him. Nothing behind him.

  The cold, damp hands of nothing reached through his clothes to his skin, stroked him, prodded him. The long-dead voice of that nothing murmured, “You belong to me,” and this time he could not doubt that what he heard, he heard with his ears and not with his imagination. What he felt, he felt for real. He flailed out with his sword, but his blade found no resistance in its arc to the floor, and steel rang hard on stone, and the shock of the blade striking ran through the palm of his hand and up his wrist, and he cried out. Lost his balance. Dropped the lamp.

  It smashed to the floor, and for a moment the oil burned brightly in its puddle on the stone, and he leaped back to escape its spread. Carrion arms caught him. Held him, while the flames guttered down to blackness, and the darkness that was more than the absence of light descended with full fury. A carrion body that he could not touch, could not hurt, though it could touch him, pressed flesh to his flesh, and the corpse chill of it and the stench of it flowed through him. He believed he would die. Too frightened to make a sound, or even to move, he wished that he could faint and find that the sun would wake him in the morning, in his own bed, the victim of nothing more than too much wine and a too-vivid dream.

  “Mine.”

  Lips moldy and rotting brushed against the nape of his neck, and fingertips that alternated putrefaction with bony fleshlessness caressed his chest, his belly, his cheek, his back.

  “I’ve waited for you for so long . . . for so long . . . for so long . . .”

  She wasn’t there. Nothing was there. But he could not break free, could not flee, and could not fight, and his sword dropped from nerveless fingers and clattered to the stone. His feet left the ground as she lifted him into the air and bore him off—blinded by the impenetrable blackness that surrounded her, by the fact that the only noise she made as she moved was a soft rustle that might almost have been the sound of a long-vanished silk skirt brushing the floor. He lost any sense of direction, of place. He did not know if she traveled up with him, or down, or for that matter which of those two things would be more frightening. He was the captive of death itself, and he could not think or reason or plan beyond that fact.

  From the floors below him he heard screams and the echoes of screams. They got closer, became louder; did he move toward them, or they toward him?

  The all-
enveloping blinding blanket of darkness, the fetor, the fear, the screams of countless unseen others—they were the walls and floor and ceiling of his world, the perimeters of his existence beyond which nothing else was.

  Then they were gone.

  He lay on a bed of stones, breathing cool, clean air scented with morning dew and loam, and the sounds that surrounded him were the moans and sobs of others, but also the sounds of a city moving to life in the time before the break of day. Human shouts, good-natured or angry, and carts and beasts of burden in the streets, and farmers bringing livestock into market someplace below. In the valley. In the world beyond Galweigh House.

  His eyes cleared, the unnatural darkness erased in an instant. He rolled to his side; sat up; looked around. He sat in the middle of a graveled road, surrounded on all sides by the Sabir troops who had taken Galweigh House, and by the officers who had led them, and by the Family who had come to direct the taking of the spoils. The road and the grassy berm to either side could have been a body-strewn battlefield, except that none of those who lay stunned and in shock seemed to be harmed. Before him, the road twisted into moonlit jungle. Behind him . . .

  He turned, and saw through the frame of palms and many-trunked strangler figs the edge of the wall of Galweigh House, and a part of the gate the Sabirs had paid so much to get opened. It slid shut as he watched. Leaving him and the rest of the conquerors once again locked beyond the impenetrable wall, and the House in the hands of the dead.