House War 03 - House Name

by Michelle West

  But Jay didn’t seem to notice—she was staring at the table’s surface, her brow furrowed as if she were chasing a vision and it was—barely—still in sight, but receding.

  “No. It was more like pictures than anything else.

  “But the words, or whatever they were, were in gold; Duster thought we could pick them out, maybe sell them. I thought we could try tracing a couple, maybe find out if Rath could read ’em. Duster got there first.”

  No surprise, Teller thought. It was Duster; they were hungry.

  “She bent down, touched the first circle, and snap, she was flying across the room.”

  “That’s where she got that burn!” Finch said, startling them all with the unexpected heat in her voice. As if she’d always wondered. Teller grimaced; she had. Finch wondered a lot but said little.

  But so did he. Thing was, if you waited long enough, you usually got answers. They often weren’t the answers you wanted, though.

  “That’s where. They were alive. The one that she’d gotten near—he moved. They were—they were asleep.”

  “The Crypt of the Sleepers,” Ellerson whispered. “Blood of the Mother.”

  Teller was almost shocked. He had never heard Ellerson use the phrase, although it was common enough everywhere else in the manse. “You do not know how lucky you were, young Jewel; there is a god that watches you. I have heard stories . . .”

  “Yeah. Me too. Like about where the Sleepers supposedly fell.”

  No one spoke. The Sleepers had fallen in the city of the Lord of the Hells; they had betrayed Moorelas, and they had paid the price for breaking their oath at the hands of their furious Queen.

  “I thought they couldn’t be—they couldn’t be the Sleepers—but they weren’t human, Ellerson. They weren’t like anything I’ve ever seen. They were taller and thinner and paler; they wore armor that only an Artisan could’ve made. And—and—they were so beautiful.” She made beauty sound like something vaguely terrifying and truly ancient.

  “You didn’t like them.”

  “How would I know? They were sleeping.”

  “Jay,” Teller said.

  “No. I didn’t. I don’t know how Moorelas could have chosen them to make his final stand with—Moorelas was as close to a god as any man’s ever going to be, but even I wouldn’t take ’em for my den. What is it, Ellerson?”

  “Tell The Terafin,” he said quietly. “Tell her all.”

  “But . . . we don’t know what it means yet.”

  “Trust your instincts.”

  Jay stared at him for a long moment; no one else spoke. It sounded to Teller as though this was the second part—or the third, or fourth—of a conversation that Jay and Ellerson had already had.

  “Do you know where it is?” Ellerson asked, when the silent stare had dragged on long past the point of comfort.

  “Could I reach it again above ground, do you mean?”

  He nodded.

  Jay glanced around the table, looking momentarily like a hunted creature. Teller wanted to tell Ellerson to go away—but he couldn’t. Tonight, Ellerson was asking all of the questions that Teller would have, and it would have taken Teller longer. But he understood Jay’s hesitation. She’d spent weeks finding either packed dirt or, worse, demons; she’d spent weeks trying to guide Meralonne APhaniel into the maze that they’d taken for granted until it had started to devour their own. She’d spent weeks failing—and she hated failure.

  Especially when the cost of that failure was writ so large in the horrible deaths of dozens—or more—of the helpless. It was too much. Hope—any hope—could be crushing because it would probably end the same damn way.

  “Jewel?”

  “I think so.”

  “This,” he said, his voice crisp and clear, but softer than normal for all that, “is unlike you. Where?”

  “Beneath the Sanctum of Moorelas.”

  Angel remembered the Sanctum. He remembered walking from the Port Authority along the seawall, leaving the docks of the harbor behind while the crowds—and the ill temper they displayed at having to wait in endless lines with their shaky paperwork—thinned. He had come to see the statue of Moorelas with Terrick, his father’s friend.

  He could not remember all that Terrick had said. But he knew the legend as well as any visitor to Averalaan might know it, and he knew what happened to those who fell under Moorelas’ shadow. He had watched the small crowds at the statue’s base move in the direction of the sun to avoid it.

  He knew that every person in the room with the single exception of Ellerson was now experiencing the profound horror of that shadow, that whispered cradle story—as if Jewel’s words had brought Moorelas’ shadow to the here and now more forcefully than the presence of demons, magic, and the whispers of gods.

  “I wasn’t aware,” Ellerson said, when it became clear that no one else would speak, “that that was possible.”

  It was a statue. It had no dirt, no doors, no obvious way in to the underground; it had, instead, carved pictures of the battles that comprised Moorelas’ brief and fierce life. But Jay didn’t lie. Carver said she couldn’t; Angel was less certain. Now, however, he knew she believed what she had just told them.

  He studied her expression, and any hope that she was wrong slowly drained from him.

  But it was Carver who put into words the rest of the den’s fear. “You fell under Moorelas’ shadow,” he said.

  Ellerson snorted impatiently. “You speak like children at street games,” he said, far more edge in the words than he usually reserved for their lack of decorum, their inability to dress themselves “appropriately,” and their language. “Will you also not step across the cracks of the cobbled stones?”

  Teller turned to face the domicis.

  “Duster died,” he said quietly.

  21st of Corvil, 410 A.A.

  Sanctum of Moorelas, Averalaan

  “Well?” Jay said.

  Carver shrugged. Angel, standing by her side, was watchful. He didn’t have the same fear as the rest of them, but he hadn’t been born in the city, and the statue itself hadn’t been part of his childhood lore. It was early morning; the sun had crested the sea horizon, and the white cast of the statue’s face was washed in pale pink and blue. The shadow he cast was long and thin, and no one was standing anywhere near it.

  That wouldn’t normally have been remarkable; at this time of the morning, no one should have been here. If Angel had any doubts about the effect of the Cordufar mansion’s spreading shadow, they died instantly. People were already huddled here, across the surface of the carvings that depicted Moorelas’ life; he could feel their fear.

  Carver, watching, glanced at Jay and then at Angel; he said nothing. But he was first to leave Jay’s side, sauntering toward the statue itself—and avoiding, as the others did, the long wedge of its shadow. It wasn’t easy to examine the statue’s base without clearing away either people or their offerings, so it took more time.

  Jay watched in silence, seeing not Carver or Moorelas, but the fearful crowd. They were strangers, of course, and not all of them were from the lower holdings, which had been home to the rest of the den for all of their lives except the last few months; some were in fancier dress and had, as offerings, food that would have been at home in the Terafin kitchens. Some of that food went not to the statue—which couldn’t reasonably be expected to eat it—but to the children huddled in various states of boredom beside their parents. This caused some tension, and Angel understood it well enough; no one wanted charity. Even the offer would have offended his father deeply.

  But children were children everywhere; they didn’t appear to notice any pity or condescension. They ate, and they chattered quietly enough that their parents hadn’t the heart to shut them up.

  Carver came back. “Nothing,” he told them. “Jay?”

  She nodded. “Angel, stay here.” She navigated the crowds—which were steadily increasing as the minutes passed—with an ease that Angel envied; she could
slide between the small gaps as easily as if she were one of the children. She examined—and this was harder—the carvings, but that was cursory; she examined the sides of the pedestal with more care. What she saw, Angel couldn’t tell, but nothing shocked or surprised her; there was no momentary widening of eyes, no sudden absence of awareness.

  There was, however, a brief exchange of prayers between Jay and the people who had come here; some words that Angel could see spoken, although he couldn’t hear them.

  In the end, she returned to them. “Nothing,” she told them quietly.

  “You’re sure this is where you came out?” Angel asked.

  “Unless there’s another Moorelas somewhere near the seawall, yes.”

  “Jay—”

  “I don’t know. But I think—I think this is where. Somehow.”

  Carver snorted. “Good luck finding it,” he said. “They’ll have to clear the statue entirely.”

  Which, given the steady crowd, was going to be a problem. Luckily, it was someone else’s problem.

  22nd of Corvil, 410 A.A.

  Terafin Manse, Averalaan Aramarelas

  All the next day, Jewel paced in the confines of the kitchen. Sleep had eluded her, because knowledge or no, the nightmares didn’t leave her alone. Now they were clearer and more focused. And the dead that rose were no longer just her dead; they were the fallen, the oathbreakers. They would bring the end of days.

  She thought they could be awakened, and she feared it.

  She also feared what she knew she must now do: Go to The Terafin, and tell her, as Ellerson had said, everything. What The Terafin could do with that information, Jewel couldn’t do. But would The Terafin believe her? Or would she have, instead, the reaction that Ellerson had had?

  Children, she thought, bitterly. At street games.

  The den came and went, and she was glad of their company. Teller left before she woke, as did Finch; Arann’s shift was at the end, not the start, of the day. But Angel, Carver, and Jester weren’t tied to someone else’s schedule, and they traveled with ease from one end of the manse to the other, as familiar with its halls as they had once been with the streets of the twenty-fifth.

  Jewel was not nearly as comfortable with the layout; she’d spent so much of her time outside the manse that it still didn’t feel like home. Maybe, she thought, it never would.

  But when they sat down for dinner—in the large room, which Ellerson insisted on—missing only Teller, who was still hard at work in Gabriel ATerafin’s office—Angel cleared his throat as he took his chair. He had gone out for the day, but only for four or five hours, and he had returned with a peculiar, grim expression.

  When they were most of the way through dinner, he was willing to share the reasons for it. Which made dinner a lot shorter, at least for Jewel, than it would otherwise have been. “The voices,” he told her—speaking to her, although everyone except Jester and Carver stopped to listen.

  She didn’t even pretend to misunderstand him. “They’re louder?” It was a fool’s question. It held hope.

  He nodded.

  “How much louder?”

  “I could hear them,” he told her, “on the way to the Port Authority.”

  “But that’s—” Her eyes widened.

  “I couldn’t hear them in the Port. I could barely hear them on the way—but, Jay, I knew what I was listening for. I stopped to talk to a friend in the Authority. He told me the magisterians are stretched to breaking. There’s some big investigation into the Magisterium at the moment, and they’re not hiring new guards—but they’re getting far more reports and far more ‘incidents’ in the past week than they’ve had in the last ten years.

  “People are panicking.” He had set his fork down, and he didn’t touch it or the food on his plate again. “It’s not going to go away on its own, is it?”

  She shook her head.

  “Is it going to keep getting louder?”

  She nodded.

  “It’ll drive people insane,” he said. “It almost drove me insane, and I had to strain to catch it all.”

  She also set her fork down. She pushed the food to one side. “I’ll go,” she told Angel.

  The rest of the den, even Carver, were now watching her.

  “Go where?” Carver asked.

  It was Angel who answered. “To The Terafin.” He rose. “Should I go with you?”

  “No. You can’t be armor against her mockery if she laughs, and if something is waiting to kill me, they’ll take you down as well.” She hesitated and then whispered something that no one could quite catch. “Hells with it,” she said. “Yes. Come with me. I’m spending enough time alone in my own head.”

  “Empty place?” Carver asked, with a lopsided grin. She smacked the back of his head on the way out.

  The only part of the manse that Jewel knew by heart was this one: the route to—and from—The Terafin’s personal chambers. She knew that all inquiries and all requests for a meeting—or an audience, as Ellerson called it, gods knew why—were in theory to be routed through Gabriel’s office. She also knew that Gabriel’s office was regularly sidestepped by people who thought they were so important that they shouldn’t have to deal with Barston, Gabriel’s personal secretary. She hesitated for a minute at the junction between the halls that led to the right-kin’s office and the halls that lead to The Terafin, and in the end she decided she could endure the wrath of a man she knew only from Teller’s reports.

  Angel didn’t speak. He walked on her right, and he glanced from side to side in the long empty hall so often that Jewel wondered if he thought she really was going to be in any danger. She didn’t ask. She was trying—and failing—to come up with some sort of speech that wouldn’t make her look like a witless child.

  Trying, in fact, to think like the woman whose responsibility was so vast it encompassed all of House Terafin. How would she hear the words Jewel had to say? How would she weigh them? What risk would the House face if she were to believe them and act on them?

  And what would she do if she did?

  The latter, she failed utterly to envision. But the former? The Terafin trusted her sight, inasmuch as she trusted anyone’s. She had sent Jewel, at the side of Meralonne APhaniel and Devon ATerafin, to places she had sent no one else, not even a member of the House. She had taken all the risks that Jewel’s vision had suggested.

  She took a deeper breath, held it, and then expelled it loudly. She hated fear. Hated it. But it was hers anyway, and the trick was just to keep going, no matter how heavy it got.

  Jewel did not immediately recognize the Chosen at the door; she’d been hoping for Torvan or Arrendas. But they recognized her. They stopped her anyway, and Angel pulled up the right rear, stopping when she stopped. They asked both her name and her business.

  “Jewel Markess. I have a matter of import to discuss with The Terafin.”

  “It’s urgent?”

  No hesitation, not now. “Yes. I don’t think we have any chance—”

  The guard who had spoken lifted a mailed hand. “We are not The Terafin,” he said gravely. “And this is a matter, if I am any judge, for The Terafin.” He glanced at Angel. “Your guard?”

  The question surprised her. “He’s my den-kin. Angel,” she added. “He’s with me.”

  The guard gave her an odd look, but he nodded and turned to Angel. “Your purpose?”

  Angel met the guard’s eyes and said, “Her back.”

  The guard’s reply was a very brief, very odd smile. “Very well. You may pass.”

  “No one’s with her, are they?” Jewel asked nervously as they stepped to one side of the still closed doors.

  “No one,” he replied, “that can easily be ordered from her presence.”

  The Terafin always looked as if she were expecting someone. Morretz was behind her and to one side, as he usually was. She sat at the long table in the library rather than behind one of the desks that seemed to be scattered throughout the manse for her use, and he
r hands were empty.

  But her eyes were shadowed, and she seemed pale. “Corrin told me that you had a matter of some urgency you wished to discuss.”

  “If I could borrow him, and he could speak for me, it’d probably make my job easier,” Jewel replied. She was rewarded by a tired, but genuine, smile.

  “He felt that your phrasing was appropriate,” she replied gently. “He is my Chosen. Had Ellerson not had some effect on your use of language, he would have opened the doors nonetheless. He understands some of what we face and some of what we . . . hope for. Why have you come?”

  “It’s about the undercity,” Jewel replied.

  The Terafin stilled. She was not a woman who fidgeted, but the absolute lack of motion was telling anyway. Jewel understood it; they hoped, and they failed, hoped and failed. It had almost come to a point where the one led inevitably to the other, like sunrise to sunset, and in between, people died. She wanted to get up and leave, but The Terafin’s expression pinned her to her chair.

  “Continue.”

  “I think—” Jewel swallowed. “I’m not sure, and it’s probably nothing, but I think there’s a way in that we’ve missed.”

  “That you’ve missed? In your outings with Meralonne and with Devon?”

  “Yes. I didn’t—I didn’t think of it, and I didn’t try to take them with me.” Mostly because there was nowhere to take them. There were no basements, no trapdoors, no comforting and comfortable tunnels.

  “Jewel,” The Terafin said, her voice on the edge of harsh. Morretz had come to stand by her side to the left, and he watched not his master but Jewel Markess. He didn’t speak, but he didn’t have to. His was a silence that could probably fell trees in the Common.

  “Have you ever gone to the Sanctum of Moorelas?” Jewel asked, forcing a firmness into her words that was as much of a lie as she’d ever offered the Lord of the House.

  “The Sanctum?” The Terafin’s face rippled in confusion; this was not the direction she’d expected the conversation to take. Which was fair. “Yes, several times. At least once a year during the Gathering. Why?” Before Jewel could answer, her eyes widened slightly. “You think you have a way in that involves the Sanctum?”