The Knife in the Dark

by D. W. Hawkins

  “There is nothing for it,” D’Jenn said. “We’ll have to make our way down these alleys until we find a clue that could point us in the right direction. Perhaps someone saw something that could help, or we’ll find something.”

  With that, D’Jenn set off down an adjacent alley, and Allen had no choice but to follow. The two of them slogged through rain puddles with their shoulders hunched against the downpour, searching through the maze of back alleys in the East Market District. Thunder rumbled overhead as the storm continued on.

  D’Jenn began marking off alleys that they’d already investigated. The twists and turns of the East Market were bad enough on the main roads. The back alleys and forgotten side streets were a virtual labyrinth of dead ends, stairs going up or down, narrow spaces between buildings, and even access tunnels that led down into Ishamael’s extensive sewer system. After a couple of hours of fruitless searching, D’Jenn began to grow worried.

  Then, rounding a corner into a dead end, they found the body.

  He was propped against the wall of a building with his head slumped to the side, his eyes staring at nothing. Blood had leaked from a couple of wounds in the man’s side, and the rain had washed it onto the cobblestones, turning the puddles around him a murky, rusted color. The corpse was wrapped in a heavy cloak, staring from a deep hood. A short sword was tangled in the sheath at his waist, thrust out of sorts by the wall behind him. D’Jenn moved his hands aside and rummaged through his clothing, finding a few silver marks in his purse. D’Jenn found the wounds that had ended the man—three punctures in his side, and a wound in the man’s armpit—and wiped his bloody fingers on the corpse’s cloak. The man’s hands had the calluses of a swordsman. A dagger lay on the ground nearby, half submerged in the bloody puddle.

  Allen moved over to the body and drew the short sword from its sheath.

  “This is no common bruiser’s weapon,” he said, showing the blade to D’Jenn. “The blade is good steel—you can tell by the color. Unless he was a very highly paid bruiser, I’d say this man was some sort of minor noble, or rich merchant’s guard.”

  “Aye,” D’Jenn said, eyeing the dagger he’d picked up from the street. “And whoever killed him didn’t bother to retrieve their dagger. A man like this doesn’t get mugged by street urchins. There was a fight here, up close and personal. He never drew that sword.”

  “I wonder…,” Allen mused, and then he squatted next to the body and began to rip the man’s long sleeves open, widening the tear until the arms were visible. Standing out against the man’s pallid skin was a single tattoo on his right shoulder—a red sword hanging point down.

  “Galanians,” D’Jenn spat, tucking the dagger into his belt. “I knew they were going to show up again.”

  “You said that you’d crippled their ship on the Stormy Sea,” Allen said.

  “We crippled one ship. Who knows how many were dispatched after us? They could have made landing and bought passage here on a river vessel, while we traveled overland through the mountains. Or even worse—they might have had agents in the city already.” D’Jenn would have agents everywhere, were he the Galanian Emperor. It only made sense.

  “The Red Swords are supposed to be an elite military unit,” Allen said. “Why would Dargorin send them here, when his war is in Thardin?”

  “He sent them after Shawna’s armlet, too. Maybe they’re just his personal mercenaries.”

  “My brother was here,” Allen growled.

  “It’s all a bit too coincidental otherwise, don’t you think?” D’Jenn said, running through options in his mind.

  “We have to alert the Conclave, and the Guard,” Allen said, his weapons clinking as he turned to hurry out into the street.

  “Wait!”

  Allen stopped and turned back to him, a frustrated look on his face.

  D’Jenn sighed. “There is something going on, and more than Dormael’s abduction. There are things happening within the Conclave—dangerous things—and I don’t know who’s involved and who isn’t. I don’t know if this is all connected, and haven’t had a chance to think it through. Until we know whom we can trust, we have to do this own our own. You and I.”

  “On our own?” Allen exclaimed. “You and I could tear this entire city apart looking for Dormael and never find him in time! Meanwhile, someone with the capability to capture a wizard, and to hide him from you, is holding him! He could be tortured, or could be dying! How in the Six Hells are you and I supposed to find him on our own?”

  “We don’t have to tear the city apart,” D’Jenn said. “There are only so many places in Ishamael where one could go to work the kind of magic necessary to hide your brother, and even fewer where it could be done without alerting every wizard within a square league to their presence—not to mention keeping Dormael himself from breaking free. It takes quite a bit to suppress the power of a wizard of your brother’s strength.”

  “Where, then?”

  “They’d need a hidden place, somewhere safe from prying eyes, and the senses of other wizards. Somewhere with enough space to construct a Greater Circle to suppress your brother, and strong enough walls to keep the energies contained. Magic on that scale is hard to keep hidden, especially in a city full of other wizards.”

  “The sewers—Indalvian’s Tunnels!” Allen said, speaking the realization aloud as it came into D’Jenn’s mind. The cousins nodded at each other, and set off at a jog to find the nearest entrance to Ishamael’s underground sewer systems.

  Thunder continued pealing overhead.

  **

  Dormael awoke with his mind hazy, a burning agony throbbing in the back of his skull. He could feel cool, damp stone beneath his skin. He was naked. Someone was running a cold finger over his chest, tracing the bruise that had formed during his dream. He tried to say something, but all that came out of his mouth was a pitiful groan of pain.

  “He’s awake,” someone said. “Hoist him.”

  There was a clinking, groaning noise, and his hands began to rise from his stomach. He realized that he was shackled, could feel the cold metal beginning to bite into his wrists as his weight was hoisted upward by his arms. His torso left the cold ground, stretching the sore, bruised muscles across his midsection. He was pulled to his feet, then higher, until only his toes could touch the ground. His legs scrambled over the wet stone, toes digging into the grit as they tried to find purchase on its slippery surface. He sputtered into the low torchlight that stabbed at his eyes.

  “Wake up, my love.” The voice was like silk sliding over his senses.

  Dormael pushed his eyelids open, head throbbing with pain as light filled his eyes.

  Inera stood before him, resting one diminutive, cold hand on his cheek. She had to rise up on her toes to reach him. She’d always been petite. That had been something he’d loved about her.

  “Where…,” he began, but she shushed him with a finger to his dry, cracked lips.

  “Don’t worry about that, love. It will all be clear soon enough.” The finger left his lips and Inera stepped away from him.

  Manacles bit into his wrists, and he glanced up to see the chain suspended from an ancient pulley system—some relic of Ishamael’s construction, put to new use by his captors. He could hear water running, trickling, and dripping all around him, echoing from stone as if he were in a cave of some sort. The air felt heavy, wet, and cool. The stones under his feet were slick and moldy, but uniform and flat.

  I’m in Indalvian’s Tunnels, he realized. I’m under the city.

  He cursed inwardly at that.

  Ishamael had an extensive system of underground sewers, storage, and secret tunnels built by Indalvian and his wizards during the city’s founding. To this day, no one had bothered to map the entire system, and plans for the original construction had been lost long ago. If he was being held in some obscure corner of the tunnels, then hope was thin that he would be rescued. If she planned to kill him, then his corpse would rot here for all eternity.


  Inera stepped across something on the ground before turning to face him, and Dormael shot his eyes to the stones underfoot. He froze. There were two curving lines of colored sand laid out in a circle around him. The inside ring was bright, almost clear—perhaps glass beads, or dust—while the outside ring, piled a little higher, was charred and black. There were runic symbols scrawled in chalk upon the ground, both inside and outside the concentric rings of sand. Dormael felt another curse brewing inside as he realized what they meant.

  He was inside a Greater Circle. They were containing him, blocking him from using his Kai.

  “You begin to see,” Inera said, turning to regard something laid out on a small wooden table behind her. Hope drained from him like water poured from a bottle. He could hear his heart beating in his ears. He felt the slight pressure of the magic around him, pressing inward against his senses and his skin, holding his own magic inside. His body began to tremble.

  “Why—,” he coughed, his throat as dry as a desert. “Why are you doing this?”

  “Oh, Dormael,” she replied, turning to face him once again. “It’s almost endearing, how little you know.” Her white hair was cascading down her small shoulders, now bare since she had discarded her cloak. Inera’s skin was a grayish color, something between an attractive paleness, and the pallor of a dead body. She was wearing a leather girdle across her midsection, a mockery of something a serving wench would wear, and underneath it a simple dress of dark brown slashed with cream. The dress was tattered and ripped, and her shapely, pale legs were visible beneath it, almost to the point of indecency. She was barefoot, and oblivious to the cold. She moved with grace, but her countenance made it the grace of a ghost rather than that of a dancer.

  The strange, flowing scar that stretched across Inera’s forehead was matched by another on her chest, dipping down between her breasts from one collarbone to the other. Her arms and shoulders were also covered by smaller scars—runes he didn’t recognize. He was disgusted by the sight of her, and yet somehow aroused at the same time, as if her ghastly appearance still conjured the memory of the way she had been before. Her eyes locked onto his, and he could feel the weight of something alien behind them.

  “Things have…changed…since you left me to die,” she said, looking his naked body up and down. She stretched like a cat as she regarded him, the look of fond memories playing across her face.

  “I begged you to leave! I wanted you to come home with me, back to Ishamael,” he coughed, his spasms sending tendrils of pain over his chest.

  “And what? Become your wife? Join the Conclave? Become a slave to their machinations? No, Dormael, that life was never meant for me. But reconciliation—or revenge—is not why I’m here.”

  “Then why?” he asked, his heart pounding.

  “Answers. If you tell me what I wish to know, then this will go considerably easier for you. It ends the same way no matter what happens, my love, so don’t hold on to any hope of escape.” Her dead eyes stared into his, unyielding.

  “You mean to torture me.” It was a statement. He knew it to be true, and could feel the dread creeping into his body.

  “Torture is such a narrow word. It simply can’t contain the description of what will happen to you if you resist me, dear one. You will know pain, surely, but on a completely different level than you ever have, and in the end you will serve me, regardless. I do not wish to cause you pain, love, so why don’t you just make this easier on the both of us? Join me. Pledge your allegiance to me. Things can go back to the way they used to be. Do you remember the time we spent together? The nights we laid under the stars making love, talking about the future? Do you remember how it felt to be together? It could be that way again.”

  Dormael did remember. He remembered the way she used to be, he remembered her laugh and her carefree attitude. He remembered her determination and her independence. This creature standing before him was not that woman. She was a remnant, a ghost. She was a puppet made of lifeless parts, animated with darkness.

  Inera is dead. He repeated that to himself over and over again.

  “What happened to you?” he asked.

  It came out quieter than he had intended. Something inside him was screaming with grief, with disbelief. It wanted to reach out to her, to see if anything of the woman he’d known could be inside this pale creature before him. Something inside of him hoped.

  Her eyes twitched just for a second, and Dormael saw her pain in that instant. Then, that alien coldness and hardened resolve was back. Her expression never wavered.

  “Where is the armlet? Where is the girl?” she asked, her eyes wooden, like a doll’s.

  “Fuck yourself.”

  Inera gave a dramatic sigh, turning her back on him and reaching onto that small table behind her. She turned back to him, holding a small, jagged knife. She looked to one of the quiet men standing behind her, and tossed the blade to him.

  “Cut him. Do it slowly.”

  **

  D’Jenn placed the palm of his hand on the stones of the sewer wall. He and Allen had come to an intersection, a place where the water, flowing in the deep trenches in the center of the tunnel, met before draining into the lower levels of the sewer. He pushed his awareness into the stone, trying to sense something within the magic, anything to help the two of them find Dormael. There was nothing, just as there had been nothing since they’d entered the sewer system.

  “Anything?” Allen asked, squinting into the dark tunnels around them.

  “No.”

  “There has to be a better way to seek him out. We’ve been running around blind down here,” Allen cursed, pounding his hand against the wall in frustration.

  “Let me think for a bit,” D’Jenn spat, frustration welling through his facade. “I can’t do it with you stomping around and snarling at the stones.”

  Allen grew quiet, and stepped away from D’Jenn, inspecting the different intersections around them. His armor clinked as he moved, his weapons shifting and rattling in their sheaths. D’Jenn wondered how he moved around with all those blades and such hanging from his body.

  Ishamael’s sewer system was a sprawling maze of tunnels that had been cut from the ground during the city’s founding. It was another of Indalvian’s wonders, providing a self-sustaining system of waste disposal that no other city had—not even wondrous Tauravon. D’Jenn had studied it during his training at the Conclave.

  It worked upon a basic filtering principle, powered by magic built on a scale the size of the city itself. The top level of the sewers was a collection level, where the city’s waste water was washed down into giant filtering reservoirs, where magical spells kept the water spinning at great speed, keeping the heavier—and nastier—things from settling. The water was then filtered through magical barriers, where it was then washed lower and the process repeated. Eventually the water reached the lowest level, where it was boiled sterile, again through magic, and washed back upwards to fountains within the city, where any citizen could come and obtain clean water for their home. The waste, moved through pipes to an area outside the city, was collected and given to outlying farmers to use as fertilizer. It was one of Indalvian’s few wonders, and nothing like it had been attempted since his time.

  The problem for Allen and D’Jenn was that the system wound through more ground than the city itself covered, and the sewers weren’t the only tunnels under the city. They’d never been fully explored, and the dangerous magic, still not understood by many wizards, kept many people from venturing into the tunnels. One could spend seasons down here, and never cross the same tunnel twice. D’Jenn cursed, trying to think of their options.

  “D’Jenn!” Allen called, his voice echoing in the underground passage. “There’s blood over here!”

  D’Jenn rushed over to his cousin, crouching down beside him to see. There were blood drops on the ground, red and beginning to dry at the edges, but new enough to still be wet. The humidity had probably helped to preserve it as well. But who
se blood was it? Could they take that chance?

  “Prick your finger,” D’Jenn told Allen.

  “What? Why?”

  “Just do it! Quickly! Drop a little of your blood beside the blood on the floor.”

  Allen cursed, but drew a dagger from his belt and slashed it over his left forearm. Red blood welled up along the wound, and pattered to the stones near the drops that he’d found. D’Jenn opened his Kai to feed a tiny bit of magic into the blood, and created a link between the two samples. The drying blood drops began to glow, leaking a rose-colored nimbus like fog rising from a swamp. Allen’s blood responded, echoing the glow even as he was wiping the wound clean.

  “It’s his!” D’Jenn said, rising to his feet and gazing down the corridor. Sure enough, there were more glowing drops farther down the tunnel, leading off into the darkness.

  “How do you know that?” Allen asked, rising to his feet as well.

  “Your blood and Dormael’s are linked. You’re brothers, so there is a slight difference between the blood that flows in your veins, but enough of a similarity to cause a reaction with my spell. He came this way, recently enough that this blood is still wet. He can’t be too far.”

  “Then what in the Six Hells are we waiting on?” Allen asked. D’Jenn just smiled back at him. The two of them took off at a run down the tunnel, their steps echoing down the lonely corridors around them.

  **

  Dormael screamed.

  He’d always heard stories of honorable men staying silent and strong through torture, never giving in to the pain of it. He’d thought that he could do it, that somehow he’d win out over the agony. He’d been wrong—horribly, painfully wrong.

  Inera asked her questions. Where is the girl, she would ask while running cool fingers across his cheeks. Where is the armlet, while walking in a circle around him. What creature made that bruise, while tracing the edges of the same.

  In the beginning, Dormael would curse at her, or threaten her, or tell her with absolute surety that someone would be looking for him. Then she’d gesture at the man standing beside her, and he would step inside the circle with that jagged little knife.