House War 03 - House Name

by Michelle West

  She spoke in Torra, of course.

  She spoke in Torra, which at least every working wicketeer and half the people on the floor would understand. It was street Torra, but they wouldn’t expect better from her.

  It was hard to feel so many eyes on her, to know that it was because of her flamboyant and uncontrolled behavior. Turning, she stormed away from Devon, heading anywhere, clearly furious. And she was angry. Angry and frightened.

  Haval’s words guided her, here. Use what you have. Show it. Let other people make assumptions.

  And, as Devon had said they would, people got out of her way.

  She couldn’t hear what he said to the money changer, and it didn’t matter. The only thing that did was that she get off this floor. She pulled off the earcuffs, and any other hanging bits that could catch on stone in the near dark, shoving them out of the way and hoping she didn’t destroy them.

  But when Devon caught up with her in the small hall that led to stairs that traveled both up toward the small offices that didn’t front the trading square and down and toward the storerooms that any building of any size maintained, she caught his hand.

  “We don’t have time,” she told him, her words coming out so shakily they were almost a whisper.

  She saw him open—and close—his mouth; whatever questions he wanted to ask, and clearly, they were there, he held in abeyance. But his fingers tightened in hers, and she pulled his hand and began to run.

  She let go of his hands when they reached the sheltered wagon docks in which merchants parked cargo that required careful inspection. The outer docks, which were used at the height of the traveling season, were open but sparsely occupied; the inner docks were not.

  In spite of her often surly delivery, he had listened to most of the words that left her mouth; it was helpful, now, because her lips were so tightly compressed, they were white. She was, he thought, as she freed her hand, afraid. No, she was more than afraid. She was terrified.

  But in terror’s grasp, she still moved, and she moved with purpose, as if that purpose had walls, like a tunnel, that she could follow, ignoring what lay without. He knew what she was searching for: a trapdoor, some way down through the old floors. These floors were well tended, unlike the chutes in the buildings that he had inspected, some at her side and some entirely alone; the seams of the wood were not so visible as to draw attention.

  But she’d said she had come up here at least once, and he believed her. It was hard, even absent evidence for her claims, not to believe Jewel Markess; she radiated the outraged earnestness of youth. She believed.

  She skirted the walls and paused behind large crates when they were near at hand; her gaze trailed wood grain as she searched. She often paused and turned that little bit too quickly, but whatever she was looking for—whatever she was so afraid of—failed to materialize.

  He watched her. Her fear was not contagious, not quite, but he was alert regardless.

  She found the hatch and signaled, but it was some while before Devon could slip into place to open it; an inspector and a merchant had engaged in a somewhat heated argument directly over the door, and while they drew attention—with the exchange of incrementally heated and veiled insults, it would be hard for them to do much else—it was not useful attention in this case.

  But at length, Authority guards were summoned, and the merchant stormed away, while the much smaller inspector grimaced and bit the heads off of anyone less senior who wasn’t busy enough to avoid staring. Which would be, Devon thought wryly, most of them.

  And then he slid in beside Jewel, pulled up the trap just enough to allow her entry. He listened, and to his surprise, he heard her drop, heard the heaviness of her landing. That implied distance, and also, a harder surface. Eyes slightly narrowed, he slid in behind her, into the darkness.

  In that darkness, she reached for his hand—and missed. He wasn’t, in the end, one of hers, and the instinctive reach, adjusted without thought for her den, did not yet exist for Devon. With Meralonne, it had never been an issue; with Meralonne, they had never found anything that was truly dark. That, and he required no light; he simply waved his hands, in that bored, indolent way of his, and light came.

  The ground here was uneven, and it was hard, almost rocky. The dirt that often characterized the first level of basement was absent; whatever the Merchant Authority was built on, it had never been soft. Rath had explained the importance of foundations to her on their early runs through the undercity, and she knew that these were too uneven to be those foundations, although they might be in the right place.

  She pulled a small, thin rope from her tunic and fastened it quickly around her waist; her hands were shaking, and quickly today was damn slow. Then she reached for Devon, and this time she found his hand. “Come on,” she told him, struggling to keep her voice calm and measured, both things he seemed to value. She tied the other end of the rope around him.

  It wouldn’t help them if they hit a crevice or a drop; it wouldn’t support their weight. But it would allow them to move without losing each other, if the need arose. And if, she thought, he meant to move in the darkness.

  Had her hair not been standing on end on both neck and arms, she might have asked for a magestone; she was certain he had one. But she was afraid of the light, here. She had never been afraid of light in this darkness before.

  Devon didn’t argue with the rope. But after she’d finished tying it—in a knot that would have caused Rath to frown for half an hour—he pulled out a magestone. It was not like the pebbles that Jewel’s den had used; it was a glass, or a crystal, the heart of which was a soft, pale gold that shaded into white.

  It figured. Even in the dank and uncomfortable rock, Devon ATerafin exuded his aura of wealth. She started to tell him to douse the light, but before the words came out, he enclosed it in his palm, and it dimmed; she could see the orange glow light his veins, no more.

  “Lead,” he whispered softly, opening his hand again.

  She nodded. The trap was here, and the tunnels would lead to the subbasement, and from there, to the undercity. She was almost certain that she would find what she’d spent weeks looking for. She should have felt the profound relief that comes with vindication.

  But she felt fear instead. It grew as she began to move, the darkness hemming her in, the path ahead growing less and less accessible as her knees faltered. The tunnel here widened. It was tall enough at this point to accommodate Devon; it was easily taller than Jewel.

  Glancing, briefly, at Devon, she straightened her shoulders and walked. “We’re under the main hall,” she told him softly.

  He nodded, glancing up, and she turned once again toward the tunnel, toward the darkness ahead, beyond which lay the undercity with its familiar streets and its painful, inexplicable losses. She took a step. Took another, while Devon almost ran into her. Her knees locked, and then she felt it: certainty, knowledge, something that she had no words for, it was so sudden.

  “The light!” she hissed, turning back, running half into his chest. She pushed them both against the closest wall and then pulled them along its uneven surface, dropping to her knees, grabbing his shirt in a silent indication that she needed him to do the same.

  His eyes narrowed; she saw that much before his hand once again guttered brilliance, denying these tunnels illumination.

  He didn’t speak a word. Not a word, and she was absurdly grateful at the moment that Meralonne APhaniel was not here; Meralonne did not skulk or hide, and she thought—had he been her partner now—he might have moved to stand in the tunnel’s center, pausing only to give her a withering glance.

  Not Devon. Devon tugged the rope very lightly, and he found a natural recess in the stone; he dropped to the tunnel floor and crawled along it, gently guiding Jewel so that she was forced to follow. Devon drew her back, and he pulled her into his arms.

  She stiffened once, and he froze. It helped. The fear helped, as well. She retreated into it, past the reflexive desire to be fre
e of any entrapment, and she sank, silent, against his chest, listening to his breath, his heartbeat, the soft sound of cloth rubbing against cloth.

  Her own breath, she held; it came and went when she needed air.

  “Jewel—”

  Lifting her hand, she covered his lips. He fell silent, and as the preternaturally loud syllables of her name faded, they were replaced by the distant sound of voices. Footsteps.

  He did not try to speak again.

  She heard the voices grow louder, but they spoke in a language she didn’t know or didn’t recognize. She didn’t dare ask Devon if he did, and not for the usual reason; here, dignity was forgotten. But with the voices came footsteps.

  What didn’t follow either was light. She heard no cursing, no stumbling, no interruptions in the fall of feet that spoke of hesitance. Whoever was coming didn’t need light to see in the darkness. She tried not to burrow into Devon. If they didn’t need light to see, they could, if they were careful, see Jewel.

  They would kill her.

  She knew it. They would kill Jewel, they would kill Devon, and the gods only knew where their bodies would eventually be found.

  Oh, she prayed. She prayed to Kalliaris, to the goddess of whim and fortune. Smile, Lady. She couldn’t even barter here; she could think of nothing she had to offer. Smile, please, please, Lady.

  The footsteps drew no closer. They didn’t pause, but space between the beats changed slightly as they began to recede. Jewel almost wept with relief. Devon relaxed beneath her, and his arms loosened their hold on her back. They only had to wait until those steps were silent again, and then they could bolt for the trapdoor, and freedom.

  But Devon rose, his back pressed against the uneven abutments, and he pulled Jewel to her feet as well. He stayed there as the unfamiliar language grew distant.

  When he spoke, however, he didn’t speak of flight. “They are going where we wish to go.”

  The last words rose, as if the statement contained some hint of doubt; she nodded. She didn’t trust herself to speak. The basement—if you could call this wide, flat place a basement, was all on a level; there was, beneath it, a subbasement, one flat and low enough that not even Jewel could stand in it. This crawl space was not easily found, but it extended well beneath the Merchant Authority in a small web, and if you followed it south—at least she thought it was south—it came to the collapsed ruin of a door’s arch, another hole—an entrance into the undercity itself.

  It was obvious. In fact, it seemed to Jewel that the basement had been built above the subbasement, and the floor had collapsed over the years, slowly sinking into the maze the way glass, over centuries, pooled toward the bottom of the Churches’ lead frames. At that, it had only sunk in the one spot, and it was not a large one: big enough for one person, maybe two. If it were in an area that was used at all, it might have been pursued; instead, it was tucked away in a moldy corner like a forgotten secret. There were boards above the hole, but they had been eaten away by time and moisture—it was these slats, hoisted out of place by Carver’s slender shoulders, that had signaled the exit from the crawl space into a larger building.

  “Then we must follow.” He started forward, toward the opposite wall, moving silently. The thin rope that bound them tautened, and he paused; it was either that or drag her, risking the sound of her fall.

  “We can’t,” she whispered.

  “We can. Or I can.”

  “Devon—”

  “That’s not a request. But if you fear to go, I will go alone.”

  “We can’t see what they’re doing.” She heard the fear and the plea in her words; later, she might hate them. But right now? Kalliaris had smiled, and Devon was going to spit in her face. “They travel in darkness. They work in darkness.” All of this, now, she knew as truth. “If we bring light, they’ll know who we are, and they’ll destroy us.” This, too, was true.

  But she knew, as the words left her lips, that he would be unmoved. This was what he needed to see and to know. She stood frozen for a moment, as the voices at last traveled beyond the range of her hearing.

  This was how she had lost Lefty and Fisher. She knew it.

  This was how they had disappeared.

  Why it was Lefty and Fisher alone, she didn’t know; they could have taken the entire den. Instead, they had let them live and crawl about the suddenly strange streets of their undercity like desperate, terrified insects.

  She should have felt anger. Or fury. Or hatred. She should have desired vengeance—or justice.

  But she felt the cold and the dark as if it would never, ever leave her. It left no room for anything else.

  Devon pulled on the thin rope again, and this time she surrendered to the inevitable. He would not return, and she knew better than to leave him.

  He had never seen Jewel so still. Gesture and movement punctuated all of her conversation; she fidgeted when she was not allowed to speak, as if the words themselves were energy that must be expended.

  But here and now? He felt her presence as a tug in the dark at his waist, no more. He did not dare to let the light play out more than an inch or two, and their progress was agonizingly slow, and not without some minor pain.

  But the T-junction itself, she navigated with care. And it was, by feel, the T-junction he had assumed it must be. The ground was flat for most of their travel; he paused once or twice, signaling by two tugs that she do the same, to listen for any sounds of movement ahead. He heard none, and what she feared, she kept to herself.

  But the floor at last began to slope ever so slightly. She tugged the rope twice and inched ahead until it was taut; he followed only when she gave it a single tug. They moved this way until she signaled a halt with a tug that was sharper and more definitive.

  Her fear was—almost—a contagion. He felt the tension of it in his arms and his shoulders; he was braced as if to leap, either to or from danger, depending on what that danger might be. His hand slid down to the daggers he carried. They were a gift—if gift was the word for something demanded—from the Exalted of Cormaris. How, exactly, the Exalted of Cormaris had known that such a demand might be forthcoming had given him pause, for the dagger had to be consecrated, and the consecration required a ceremony that was not mere minutes in the enacting.

  But that question was both Duvari’s concern and Duvari’s problem; of the Astari, only Duvari was capable of the sustained suspicion necessary to investigate the god-born son of the Lord of Wisdom.

  Darkness. Damp, cold. The only light that touched it at all came from the fragments Devon allowed between the fingers of the fist that held his expensive magestone. Jewel had always thought she feared the dark; she understood, now, what fear was. It was hard to move; it was hard to breath. She did both, her mouth dry.

  She needed some light to navigate, but she didn’t want it, and every time some small ray illuminated the floor, she had to bite her lip; she wanted Devon to gutter it entirely because light—any light—increased their danger.

  But she knew that a fall here would be bad; if she fell, if she lost that much control, they would hear it. They would know. Who they were no longer mattered; death was death. Had she faced this fear, this visceral, terrible panic, she would never have searched for her lost kin. She wouldn’t have been able to.

  Now, without the hope of finding and saving them, it was so much harder. She knew that this was what she’d been searching for for almost a month; she hadn’t known it, then. If she had, she might not have tried so hard.

  But . . . her den was safe. For now, it was safe. She had to do this.

  It was easier when the incline grew steep enough that she had to flatten herself completely against the fallen surface of rock; it was solid and cool against her chest, and it removed at least the fear of tripping or falling. She inched forward along the surface to the edge of the entrance. There, slats, broken boards, added splinters to her fingers.

  She’d found it. Here was her proof.

  But she felt no trium
ph; had she been on her own, she would have gained her feet and backed away, moving as quickly and silently as she could. She tugged the rope twice, and Devon joined her. His breath was even and regular; it was almost calming.

  But it shifted slightly when he saw what she’d touched: The slats, the broken boards, had been pulled up. This was where they had to go, yes—but it was also where the unknown others had gone. They were in the subbasement.

  Normally, this wasn’t a bad drop; because of the way the floor sloped, it wasn’t hard to get back up, but Jewel had only done it twice. What had made this particular exit so hazardous was the timing and the crowds above it. Then? She’d been worried about discovery; about what Rath would say—or do—if he found out that she’d revealed the existence of the undercity.

  Rath was dead.

  She didn’t want to join him. Taking a breath to steady herself, she lifted her body from the comfort of its connection with solid ground and crouched on bent knees just above the exposed entrance. Devon tugged the rope once, and then, to make his point clearer, he caught her shoulder in one hand, pushing her gently away.

  She understood what he was offering her, and she wanted to take it so badly it was hard to speak. But what she said, instead, and in a voice so faint she hardly knew it as her own, was, “Devon, I have to go first. I know the tunnels.”

  He shifted his hand from her shoulder to her arm and tightened it briefly. This, too, she understood. She lowered herself into the crawl space, and his hand never left. It should have been awkward, but it was the only warmth she felt—at all—and she couldn’t bring herself to tell him to let her go.

  The ground was solid, and the drop was so slight she could land without making noise; it was the only good thing about the slow sinking of the upper floor. Devon slid the magestone into his shirt; from here on, they would be navigating entirely by touch. Jewel’s memory was not as good as either Duster’s or Carver’s, and she’d not come this way often—but she remembered no gaps, no sudden crevices, no sharp and deadly drops. If she moved slowly, she could make it out and into the streets of the undercity.