From Under the Mountain

by Cait Spivey

  With a final, massive boom, the gate to the underworld came tumbling down. The rock turned to black smoke as it fell and was enveloped by the swirling wind racing through the cavern. Arginine and Alanine lifted their heads slightly, squinting to see through the whirlwind. The tear they’d made was pulsing with purple light and something else, something that made their ears ring but made no noise. The rip was expanding, too, becoming large enough to join into the gaping hole left by the collapsed gate. The girl-thing seemed to have disappeared.

  Disoriented, the witches tried to stand, supporting each other as well as they could with their mutually shaky limbs. They wrapped scarves over their noses and mouths to avoid inhaling the heavy smoke. The wind was still strong enough to make walking difficult, but they gripped hands tightly and turned toward the exit, pushing against the strong currents of air that held them back.

  “My friends, where are you going?” roared the huge, disembodied voice of the creature.

  Arginine and Alanine stopped and braced themselves as they looked around. All they could see was smoke; no girl, no dragon, nothing.

  “You cannot leave. Remember, I promised to help you,” the thing said.

  The gate pulsed one more time; the wind died down, and the glowing purple edges dimmed. The next instant, light exploded and the wind rushed them all at once. Arginine and Alanine were blown over and dragged the length of the cavern; before they hit the far wall, the wind banked and carried them back to where the gate had once been. It dumped them to the ground and they landed on hands and knees, coughing and gasping violently as they attempted to regain their breath.

  They looked up. A well-dressed and delicately featured young man approached them out of the roiling smoke. He wore a silver tunic that went up to his chin and ballooning, cream-colored trousers tucked into knee-high black boots. His jet black hair was gathered into a ponytail at the crown of his head. He smirked down at them with a wicked twinkle in his black eyes.

  “Arginine,” he said. “Alanine. I believe that together, the three of us can do great things in this modern world.”

  Alanine gripped her throat and heaved, her thin frame wracked and convulsing. Arginine coughed and reached for her sister. Her body felt brittle and cold, and she could not seem to get enough air into her lungs. The scarf felt almost too tight around her face. She rubbed Alanine’s back haltingly and glared up at the creature, now in the form of a man.

  “Who are you?” she demanded raspily. “What do you want?”

  “I am the one from under the mountain,” the man replied.

  He began to laugh hysterically, and as he did, smoke poured from his open mouth. His entire body dissolved into the writhing mass, but Arginine thought she caught a glimpse of those winking, evil eyes.

  A moment later, the smoke rushed toward them, and everything went black.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Eva looked out her window and down at the activity below. Her view overlooked the palace green, and it was usually an idyllic and relaxing sight; the great expanse of unblemished land was covered in grass such a perfect shade of green that it made one wonder how art could ever hope to surpass nature. And now, it was also covered with scurrying human forms digging half-hearted pits into which empty sacks of blood and bone would be unceremoniously dumped. The priests were certainly about, the sun gleaming off their shaved and oiled heads, doing what they could; but there was no avoiding the ugliness of what was happening below.

  At last, at last, Eva had something undeniable to use against Thiymen clan—blatant dereliction of duty!—and her hands were tied. She clenched those hands into fists. Any moment now, she expected to see black sails whipping toward them across the sky, carrying hordes of ghostly witches come to steal their souls . . . but she kept her silence. To rail against Thiymen now would only upset Guerline’s temporary peace, and she couldn’t make such a move. Not when all her efforts were to get Guerline as far away from the dangers of magic as she could.

  Half of the city’s guards had been recruited to dig individual graves for the dozens upon dozens of recently deceased, Thiymen-neglected citizens of Del. Many of the dearly departed’s family members assisted, but the work was tedious and time-consuming. The sun blazed through the afternoon sky, roasting the mess below.

  Though the enchantments on the stone protected her from the worst of it,Eva could feel the heat in the air. It did nothing to soothe her clammy skin, nor unknot the cold twist of fear in her stomach. It was happening—it was really happening. Soon there would be no way to stop the fall of the Kavanaghs.

  Alcander had always been loose of tongue when he was around her, perhaps out of a desire to impress her with his maneuvering. She still remembered the night he’d told her about his discovery of the twin witches hiding in Del, banished from their clan, and how they too despised the Kavanaghs. Those witches, he’d slurred, provided him the final piece of his plan to revolutionize the empire. He would knock the witch clans down a peg by arresting the Kavanaghs and possibly executing them for treason and insubordination, then prevent the witches from selecting new leaders from within their own ranks. It was Alcander’s wish to place a human in the position of Lord Paramount for each region, to rule over the witch clans as well as the human towns.

  Yet he knew that the witches would not be intimidated merely by legal action. They were too single-mindedly loyal to their leaders for that. The part of his plan that included preventing the witch clans from choosing new leaders, or from seeking vengeance for the Kavanagh sisters, was the truly difficult part. To use military force would be impossible, since the Adenen witches were the entire standing army and special forces. There was little enough Alcander could have offered the witches in the way of bribes because of their magical skill, and to try and buy them all off with gold would have bankrupted the empire. Threats were worthless because he had no teeth to bite them with if they didn’t listen to his barking. But whatever action he took needed to be swift and irrefutable, because Alcander had hated to think of what would happen if all the witches in the country came raging with their magic on the capital.

  After weeks of this contemplation, Alcander had met the Maravilla twins, Arginine and Alanine. They’d offered him the decisive power he needed. It was their own plan to overthrow the Kavanagh sisters, and Alcander had had no qualms about leaving that part of the plan to them. All he’d needed to do was continue his campaign to turn the people against the Kavanaghs.

  Evadine stared out her window at the corpses being laid in the earth. She had continued to visit the twins after Alcander’s death, claiming, as she had with the councilors, to be continuing the prince’s plans. Where Alcander had been jealous of magic, though, Eva truly feared it, and witches who had turned their backs on the laws of the clans were terrifying to her. Still . . . she’d thought it better to have one hand in the snake pit than to not see the snakes at all.

  She often wished that she could divulge everything to Guerline; the past two months had been an exercise in self-control. There were so many secrets, her own as well as the ones she’d inherited from Alcander. The lies were like so many juggling knives, and the longer she tossed them, the faster they spun, the closer they came to slicing her flesh. She had so, so delicately sought to sway Alcander’s allies toward less aggressive methods, but now? Something had begun, something that was, despite all her efforts, beyond her knowledge.

  She tried to recall all the comments from that morning’s handling of the Thiymen situation. Desmond Kavanagh was the son of Sitosen; one would think that he’d be able to contact his relations, but for some reason, he had not been able to. What had Guerline asked him? Whether it had something to do with damage to a gate? Yes, that’s right—the gate to the underworld.

  Eva frowned. She wondered if that had anything to do with the Maravillas’ plans to get rid of the Kavanaghs, and if so, what it meant for those plans. Was this a sign of their success? Was it intentional? Or was it a sign of their failure? Eva resolved to find out. She p
ut on her purple silk overdress and summoned her herald.

  Due to the crowd, she exited the palace gates surrounded by twelve guards instead of her usual six. The extra protection, however, did absolutely nothing to protect her from the stench of the square. The rankest parts of the city were confined to the Third and Fourth Neighborhoods and rarely contaminated the center, where the palace and noble houses were situated in a wide and carefully monitored green idyll separate from the rest of the city. But after the perfumed air of the palace, even the First Neighborhood seemed squalid.

  The filth of the edges had come to the center, following on the heels of both the living and the dead. Some of the mourners were respectable enough, but the ones arriving now were those who came from the Fourth Neighborhood, and they came in droves. The poor died far more frequently than the rich, and though Eva had always known it, this was the first time she had really seen it demonstrated with such . . . poignancy. The family and friends of the recently—and some not-so-recently—deceased flooded into the square, carrying their loved ones’ corpses high above the press of the crowd. The guards flagged them in different directions, to different sections of Guerline’s makeshift graveyard, while others went through the crowd and recruited the able-bodied who weren’t supporting corpses for grave digging.

  There were so many of them that Evadine actually began to doubt the extensive palace green would accommodate them all. And what about afterward? Had Guerline considered that yet? Was she intending to leave all these rotting carcasses in these shallow graves, or would she demand they be relocated to their originally planned places of final rest? The animals would get at them before too long if they stayed in these graves, which were more mounds than pits.

  Eva held an absolutely pointless handkerchief over her mouth and nose to try and block the stench of putrefaction, bit her lower lip to keep from gagging, and waved her front men on impatiently. They set off, but were quickly blocked by the mass of bodies. Evadine wished the guardsmen had carried their shields like she’d asked. It would have made it so much easier to get through everyone.

  She shot her herald a pointed look, and he began to sound his horn with loud, short, insistent blasts. The people in the square looked around and realized that a noblewoman was trying to get through. Most didn’t react, still stunned by their grief and anxiety, but others tried to shift and make room for them to pass. The effect was disgustingly minimal. There were simply too many bodies in the square. Eva’s frown deepened, and she gestured her front men forward again. This was going to take a long time.

  The group had taken maybe another step when something brushed Evadine’s head. She reached up to bat it away and realized that it was the arm of one of the dead men held aloft by his mourners. She shrieked and jumped back. The guard nearest to her drew his sword and quickly severed the offending limb, which fell to the cobblestones with a sickening splatter.

  The crowd’s reaction was immediate. The dead man’s bearers cried out in agony at the ruination of his body and reached down to snatch the arm out of the way. The rest of the people in the square backed away in horror and squeezed protectively around their own darling corpses, as though afraid that Evadine and her guards would simply start going around the square and hacking their dearly departed to pieces. In the rush to get away from Evadine the mad butcher, a wide and spacious path appeared before her and her guards.

  “That was extremely effective. Well done, Hamish,” she said, smiling at him. Hamish, who was young and relatively new to the palace guard, had been staring in shock at the place where the arm had fallen; at Eva’s comment and smile, he turned red and looked at his feet.

  She caught a glimpse of the dead man’s family as she turned forward again, and her relief at having space to move faltered. What would Lina do in such a situation? Kneel with them, comfort them? She doubted that even Guerline could come up with a way to make the severing of their relative’s arm seem all right. Eva looked up into the crowd, determined to ignore them, and froze when she saw Alcander standing just outside her circle of guards, staring at her with black eyes. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. When she opened her eyes again, he was gone.

  “Shall we?” she said to her guards.

  The tower in which the Maravilla twins had set up house was a former jail tower, kept close to the palace for trial purposes but otherwise separate. The way was still thick with mourners making their way to the palace, but with Eva’s herald announcing their coming, the people made their way to the sides of the street.

  The little procession stopped in front of the witches’ tower. Evadine knocked on the door and waited, as she usually did, for it to open. It didn’t. Eva knocked again, to no avail. She huffed impatiently, and experimentally tried the door handle. To her great surprise, it was unlocked.

  “Wait here,” she said to her entourage, and she stepped over the threshold, closing the door behind her.

  It was dark except for a weak glow at the top of the entrance hall’s stairs. The tower only had a handful of windows, and only on the first floor, which was not used for prisoners. Eva put a hand on the wall, lifted her skirts with the other, and slowly went up the stairs. The common area on the first floor was dimly lit by sunlight coming in through the two small windows which looked onto the street. The room looked exactly the same as the last time she’d been in it, nothing out of the ordinary. Eva walked to the center and turned slowly in place, taking everything in. She waited, but still no tall, blonde twins came to meet her.

  “Hello?” she called. “Arginine? Alanine?”

  No answer. How strange. She supposed it was feasible that the twins may be out upon some errand or another, but it had never happened before; that is, the twins had always been home whenever she’d called on them. Witches were notorious for keeping to themselves and their castles—or towers, in this case; especially Sitosen witches, which the Maravilla twins had once been. And how odd, that they should not lock their door, either conventionally or by some kind of magic. Thinking of what might have happened made the hair on Evadine’s neck stand on end.

  A moment or two more of waiting continued not to yield the twins, so Eva ventured to explore. On all of her previous visits, she had been confined to the common area. The stairs that came up from the entrance continued on to the upper levels of the tower, so Eva went over and mounted them once more. The upstairs was dark, untouched by daylight. After a moment’s consideration, Eva went back to the common room. She spotted a candle and reached for it, already looking around for wherever witches might keep flint—did witches even use flint?—but when she closed her hand around the candlestick, the wick burst into flame.

  She almost dropped it in her astonishment, but luckily maintained her grip. Eva stared at it in horror, wondering if she had been a witch all this time without realizing it, and set the candle back down on the table. As soon as she did, it went out. A long-standing spell that reacted to her flesh, then. Relieved, she held the candle aloft and went up the stairs to the second floor.

  The second floor appeared to be the twins’ bedroom. It was huge and round. The entire expanse of wall was lined with floor to ceiling bookshelves. A ring of workstations also made up the outer edge of the room. In the center were two mid-sized four-poster beds and a small sitting area. The bedspreads and rugs were lustrous and richly colored. Evadine nudged the corner of one rug with her toe and wrinkled her nose.

  If there was anything of note in the bedroom, it was not recognizable to Eva. There were various instruments on the workstations, but none of them were familiar to her. She couldn’t even begin to guess what they were for. The only thing she learned from this second floor of the tower was that the Maravilla twins were almost certainly not at home. She wondered whether they had enacted the first phase of whatever plan they’d hatched. If that first phase involved some kind of attack on Thiymen clan, they, like Alcander, must have believed that the coven of death was the biggest threat to Arido.

  Eva went back to the stairs and
climbed up to the third floor. As she neared the door—the third floor was the only floor closed off, it seemed, since the other entrances were open to the stairs—she noticed a strange, purplish kind of light. It seemed to pour down the stairs, dissipating three or four from the top into smoke-like wisps. When she was close enough, Eva leaned down cautiously and swept her hand through the hazy light. It felt cool, but otherwise harmless. She examined her hand close to the candle. It appeared to be undamaged by the purple aura, so she proceeded up the stairs and opened the door.

  In the room, the purple light was ubiquitous but remained oddly dim. It emanated from the piles and piles of braided and twisted cloth which filled the room. She turned and examined the one nearest to her. It was perhaps two feet in length, made up of multiple thin strands of silk; these were braided, and then those braids were braided, and so on, and then the thick braid was wound and twisted upon itself into a kind of figure-eight knot.

  She reached out to touch it. When she did, the hair on her arms stood on end and her breath caught in her throat. She gasped and pulled her hand back. Whatever the coils were, they contained great power—and the room was full of them. This must have been what the twins were working on. They were stockpiling magical energy. But where did it come from? Was it their own power, bound into the silk and tucked away for later use?

  Whatever plans the twins had for this stored magic, they had left it unguarded, and Evadine was not the kind of woman who turned away from an opportunity. The coils made her deeply, instinctually unsettled, and were further proof against magic’s inherent goodness. She went back down the stairs and out of the tower. When her guards saw her, they began to get back into formation, but Evadine held up her hand to indicate that they wait.