“They’re looking at us,” Lysa whispered.
“Don’t move.”
“I’m not moving.”
They said nothing, did nothing. Simply stared, much like a street cat standing across the way in the dead of night, watching with mere curiosity as the drunks roam and stumble.
Before long, the Custodians walked onward down the hallway, and the door to the holding chamber opened and closed.
“Try number two,” I said. “Shall we?”
“Wait,” Lysa said, still crouched. “The conjurers — how can we free them?”
“Now you ask that question? You’ve really awful timing. We’re going to free them like you free a fish from your net: point them toward an opening, and wave as they swim away.”
Lysa blinked. “Are you kidding me? You better be kidding me.”
I leaned against the wall as if this fortress was my own. “When are you going to trust me? You think I’d go in here without a plan of escape?”
“Um, yes? You’ve done it before. And a lot of times you ask questions when you don’t have any good answers, to give yourself more time to think of one. Like you’re doing now.”
This was one of those times when I wished Serith Rabthorn had given birth to a less observant daughter.
“Fair enough,” I said. “But I do have a plan this time. We gather the conjurers, they make a run for it to Scholl, then I skip off into Mizridahl.”
“What?”
“You’ll see,” I said. “Come on, we can’t keep pissing around. Who knows how long it’ll take for those conjurers to keel over like the last batch.”
With a very reluctant Lysa Rabthorn following me, I jogged to the stairs again. This time, we made it past the third step and the fourth, all the way to the very last one, which led to a wide landing without a roof.
“Nice view,” I remarked, staring off into a void of gem fields below. No slaves were present at these ones, no picks tinking into the fat, colorful veins. Only a pristine, untouched wilderness of gems.
We went up another set of stairs, walls and a ceiling closing us in again. At the top, a thin hallway hemmed us in. The ceiling was low and uneven, as if hastily put together. Few flames flickered up here, and those that did were mounted into rusted holders affixed to the wall.
The hallway extended both ways, ending at either side with a door. Given where we heard the door slamming and the ceiling croak from below, it was a good bet the conjurers were being held down the left corridor.
“Isn’t it strange,” Lysa said, bringing up the rear, “that there aren’t any guards?”
I looked back at her. “Don’t say things like that.” I paused a few feet before the door. “Listen, I don’t know what we’re going to find in here. Hopefully these conjurers aren’t homicidal.”
Lysa click-clacked her teeth. “And if they are?”
With a few fingers in my pocket, I fiddled around till the sensation of smooth glass glided past my knuckle. I pulled it out, then realized I had the wrong vial and tried again. Never left home without my trusty vial of poison, just in case I ever found myself in a dire situation without an escape. One swig of the stuff and I’d be departing for Amortis, far away from a dungeon or a slave camp, or whatever foul imprisonment confined me. Or at least that was the idea. After I thought about it, that plan didn’t make much sense here. It was a great plan if faced with peril in the living realm, but I wasn’t in the living realm. I was in Amortis. If I died here… I’d be reborn here. Well, shit, I thought.
“Ellie gave me this,” I said, holding a different vial up to Lysa’s face. “Liquid fire. Well, sort of. You still need a spark, so she claims. But I’ve got flint.”
Her blue eyes flickered like the sea reflecting lightning back to the sky. “You’re going to burn them?”
“Correction: I’m going to burn this place. If we can’t take the conjurers for ourselves, better no one has them. I figure the Preen are stored here, somewhere. They should catch too. Won’t be a single vessel for Arken to use to recapture their souls.”
She dragged her teeth across her lip, thinking. She was always thinking. “Some conjurers can put the mind to sleep. Maybe if I try that, we can… I don’t know. We can subdue them, maybe.”
“Sleep? As in a snoring, eyes-closed kind of sleep?”
She cocked her brow. “There’s another kind?”
“Well, there are at least six groups of eight in here, and probably a whole helluva lot more. Think you can put forty-eight people to sleep?”
Lysa frowned.
I shook my head. “No. Either they leave with us, or this fortress goes up in smoke.”
“We can’t just strike a match and walk out. There are Custodians and guards, if you haven’t noticed. Maybe even Wardens.”
Mm. Wardens. That thought made me shiver. But I doubted there were any Wardens here.
“Eight Custodians and a handful of guards,” I said. “We don’t need to kill them, just run away from them.”
“There could be more.”
“Could be, but I doubt it. Parapets were empty, no sign of life elsewhere. I think this fortress was designed with only one purpose in mind: to ferry Arken’s army into Mizridahl. There’s a tear in here, somewhere. In that room, I bet — where they dragged the conjurers out of, and where we would’ve ended up.”
The faintest of smiles touched her lips as she realized I did have a plan. Unfortunately, her part would see her departing with the conjurers, rather than we me. Dead things can’t return to the living realm, after all.
“He didn’t expect to be attacked here,” I said. “Only enough Custodians and guards to keep the peace.” Big breath in, big breath out as I eyed the door. “You ready? We might need your conjurer voodoo if things get hairy. Just… try to keep yourself conscious, will you?”
“I’ll do my best,” she said in a disarming voice. Who exactly it was intended to disarm, I wasn’t certain.
The iron door handle was cold against my palm, quite the contrast from the sweat moistening my other hand as I gripped a leather-wrapped hilt with white knuckles. Lysa had her sword — or rather, mine — out as well. The last time I’d offered her my blade, she had almost taken my head off, but hopefully she’d read in one of those books of hers how not to decapitate your friends.
I rested my chin against my shoulder so Lysa could see me mouth the countdown.
I went to throw the door open and instead threw my shoulder into the unmoving frame.
“Fuck,” I spat, wincing and massaging my poor shoulder. I hadn’t expected it to be locked.
A couple pairs of fingers tap-danced along the steel backing of my breastplate. I turned to see Lysa pointing at the door, then at her ear.
An unmistakable clanking approached from the closed room. Not a clanking of iron boots across the floor, but rather feet made of gems. It’s a sound that never leaves you once you’ve heard it, and I’d already heard it far too often during my time in Fragment Zero. I loathed to hear it again, particularly at this moment in time.
The clanking ceased, and when it did, a long pair of jagged shadows stabbed out from beneath the door frame, a vague resemblance of chipped gems mashed together.
There was a click.
Then a breath on my neck, hot as a stagnant summer air. Lysa’s.
I lunged forward, timing it perfectly. The door opened just the summit of ebon would have splintered its wood. Instead, the tip splintered the slender gemmed neck of a Custodian.
The creature stumbled back, tried to straighten itself.
Before it could mount a counterattack, I dashed into the room. Brought my blade up from the floor, rising at a steep angle, till it cut inside and sawed right through the throat of that perversion.
The Custodian’s head tumbled off its shoulders, screeching across the floor till it smacked a wooden post and came to rest.
Tink tink tink tink. A fan of gem shavings tinked off my chest and legs and helmet. One ricocheted against the rim of my h
elm’s eyehole, falling harmlessly inside, against my face.
A second Custodian stood at the far end of the room — fifty feet away — and between us stood a series of bunks which housed the wide-eyed and the gasping and the pale-faced.
“Get down!” I hollered to them as another flurry of gem fragments broke away from the Custodian and skittered through the air, paring the wood from the bed frames and the gray rind from the stone walls.
“Cover your eyes,” I told Lysa, inching forward shoulder first like a mobile bulwark.
“Agh!” cried a man from above, in one of the beds. And another, this one a woman.
This fucking thing is going to alert the whole goddamn fortress, I thought. At the rate Lysa and I were moving, it’d take damn near a half hour to reach the colorful bastard.
So I did what any sensible assassin would do in my position: I went on a blind rampage.
Throwing my plated arm across my eyes, I ran forward, hopeful that I was keeping a straight line.
“Right!” Lysa hollered out. “Left, left, left!”
I could hear the gems peeling and snapping off the Custodian. Whizzing through the air and tinking off my armor. The space of time between the whizzes and the tinks grew shorter.
I was almost there.
Almost there.
Actually, not almost. I was there. How did I know this? Because when I peeled my hand away from my eyes, a realization hit me hard and true: Lysa had been screaming “Stop!” for the past few seconds. Also, the Custodian had ripped off one of its arms and used it as a goddamned mace with which to pummel me in the chest.
The force of the blow snapped my head back, threw my feet into the air. I found myself on the stone floor, struggling for breath. A quick feel of my breastplate revealed cratered iron.
“Astul!” Lysa screamed. “Roll! Roll out of the way!”
I rolled, mostly out of pain. The Custodian came down on my ribs with his arm. I heard iron crunch and felt a tremor jostle my organs around. A harrowing pang shot across my ribs as I rolled to my left, clutching my stomach.
Then a whoosh, throaty and guttural, clamored inside that makeshift dormitory. Walls and a ceiling may have enclosed me, but I swore I felt the wind. Its gusts cascaded down the back of my bent breastplate, cool and harsh against my flesh.
I tossed my head against my shoulder, glancing over to where the Custodian should have been. But instead of a gemmed creature, curly tails of an effervescent white streaked by, swirling away. With a straining neck, I trailed the strange wisps all the way to Lysa, and then out the door, down the hallway and around the corner, where we’d come up from the stairs.
If the wind could be conjured in such a way that it’d deliver an incalculable burst of power, that, I decided, would be what it’d look like: a thin stream of white wispiness, as if the clouds themselves had been sucked down from the sky.
The Custodian who’d beaten the shit out of me with its arm lay in a crumpled mess against a broken wall. Lysa moved swiftly to decapitate it before it could — if it was able — salvage what strength it had left.
The head of rubies and peridots and emeralds and sapphires rolled unevenly along the floor. I tried tracking it, but a warm voice advised me to not move.
“I have seen more than I have ever wished,” said the woman, voice hauntingly familiar, her words dripping with the sweetness of honey. “But this… this is, quite frankly, preposterous.”
Everything in me turned cold soon as I matched face to voice. I squirmed, trying to get away. Desperately trying to get away.
“Astul!” Lysa cried, “stop! Stop.” Her face was pale and her teeth chattered. She looked sick. “We need to get you out of that armor. It’s probably impaled you.”
With the bewilderment of a woodpecker whose home was currently being chopped down, I said to Lysa this: “Ahmrifriflel, itmfgh rmghthfr tshregh.” And at that moment, it came to my attention that part of my helmet had also suffered catastrophic damage and was pressing firmly into my mouth.
Lysa helped pry it off my head.
“Amielle is—” I paused. “Right there. Beside you.”
“Yes, I am. It’s nice to see you again, Astul.”
My teeth had a very good chance of shattering under the pressure I was exerting on them. Luckily, they did not. She looked the same as she had before Patrick Verdan had executed her. Little bit paler in the face, but death’ll do that to you. Still had the same head of auburn hair, although it was shaggier now, longer, dirtier. Her hazel eyes were dull and dusty.
She pushed a finger against my breastplate, grunted, and lifted a small panel of iron up.
“Argh!” I screamed, kicking my legs out and writhing in agony.
“It’s embedded in his flesh,” Amielle said. “It will be easier to cut it off of him, then remove the pieces as necessary. Or, we can let him bleed out. There are Preen in the storeroom.”
“I’m not bloody dead!” I said. “Don’t you dare let me bleed out.”
“Not dead? But—”
“It’s a long fucking story,” I said. “One that I don’t have time to tell right now. Block that door with something and cut me out.”
Amielle scooted an ebon blade to Lysa with her foot. “You had better do the honors. I believe trust is something the two of us have never shared.”
Yeah, wonder why. “Put the blade against the edge here,” I said, laying a finger on the outer edge of the breastplate. “And saw. Try to keep from cutting me open, yeah?”
Lysa didn’t laugh. She held the sword with a deadly serious demeanor — a demeanor which often arises from one of two emotions: utmost confidence, or… utmost consternation. Given Lysa’s experience, or lack thereof, with sharp things that bleed you, I figured it was the latter.
She began sawing gently, the immaculate ebon edge biting into the iron with fluid grace. Cutting me out of this armor wouldn’t be a problem. But doing it while I remained conscious? An entirely different story.
The pain… gods, the pain. I clenched my jaw, puffed air into my cheeks and squirmed like a little boy being dragged along the cobbles by his mother to face his punishment for lying.
I wished I was facing such a punishment. Life had doled out its discipline to me before for telling a tale, and that pain was something I had taken standing up, right on the chin. This pain made me curl into a ball and bleat.
A husky voice blared from behind the door. “Custodian Olligan? Hello?”
Lysa managed to sever the front of the breastplate without plunging ebon into my stomach or chest. Soon as the iron shell split apart, the piece that was lodged into my side sprung up, but not out.
I screamed. Pounded the floor with my fists.
A pair of feet moved swiftly across the stone floor. “You must pull it out of him,” Amielle said. “Elsewise, he’ll be poisoned from the metal.”
I groaned, hand over my mouth so if I screamed again, it wouldn’t be so loud.
“He’ll also be in a great deal of pain,” Amielle added. “Lysa, you can do this.”
In between the shades of agony that were beating me into submission, I had the faintest perception that Lysa seemed… different. The courage and outspokenness she’d carried since the day I’d met her relented. Or perhaps more accurately, scurried away fearfully.
She appeared very much like many of the early Rot recruits had when I’d graced them with my presence: soft-spoken, submissive, meek. I’d quickly learned to change my approach to instruction and leadership, shying away from the crass and callous behavior that’d shaped me.
It appeared Amielle was doing the same.
“Custodian Olligan?” came the voice again, with the jolting of the door handle. Then a curse.
“There you go,” Amielle said, crouching beside Lysa. “Now pull, hard. Harder than you’ve ever pulled before.”
There was a tear on Lysa’s cheek. She sniffled and in a plugged-up voice said, “On three. One—” And she pulled.
“H’yuh!” I cri
ed, feeling the mangled iron withdrawing from my flesh. Instantly, the overwhelming pain shattered into a dull ache interspersed with occasional sharp outbursts. To put it simply, it was tolerable, if uncomfortable.
“Lysa,” Amielle said, putting a hand on her shoulder. “I’m sorry. For everything. I really, truly am.”
“Fuck,” I spat. I sat up, cupping the wound on my stomach, feeling my warmth spill out between my fingers. “That’s a lot of blood. You got a needle here, anywhere?”
“Here,” a woman shouted. She jumped off her bed and crossed the room, bare feet slapping away. She pulled something from her hair and dropped it into Amielle’s hand. “If you sharpen it, perhaps…”
Amielle nodded. “Thank you, Marlee. Astul, give me your dagger.”
I shot her a suspicious look. “How do you know I have a dagger?”
“If you’re the same Astul I remember, you have a dagger. On your right leg.”
I grunted and rolled up my pant leg. I’d have to be less predictable in the future. Maybe put it on my left thigh.
With the ebon dagger, Amielle meticulously shaved away the sides of the metal hairpin Marlee had given her till it resembled a needle. She cut away a piece of sleeve from her shirt, frayed it till she had plenty of string, then wrapped the string around one end of the pin.
As she positioned the pin to begin suturing me up, an explosive burst shot through the door.
A broad, gemmed fist.
“Hell,” I said.
The lock seemed to be holding fairly well, and the conjurers had braced the bottom half of the door with two wooden chests, but it wouldn’t take more than a few fists through the top to widen a hole big enough for a couple Custodians to slip through.
“Take this,” Amielle said, passing the pin to Lysa. She got up and hurried across the way, to a gathering of conjurers watching the door with fidgeting hands and feet.
I swiped the ebon sword lying near Lysa. “They want a fight, then let’s have it.”
Lysa threw her palm into my chest as I tried to will myself to my feet.
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