by Patty Jansen
Stupid, really, for Rider Cornatan to hold him prisoner in the dungeons all those years ago. Did the man know what icefire could do, of how he could scan and map the entire underground section of the palace, all its levels, its ramps and staircases, even down to the white lines painted on the floors by generations long past?
The flame on the torch flapped with a rancid breeze.
Tandor smiled. Of course.
That breath of air had to come from somewhere and had to be going somewhere. This was not a dead end at all. There was an illusion at work in this room.
For all he hated icefire, Rider Cornatan had no qualms using it, for the Knights of course would be unable to see the wall where Tandor saw it. With that knowledge, Tandor again walked the perimeter of the room, probing with icefire. This time, he found the passage, opposite the exit to the stairs. He pushed his clawed hand through the wall, then his other hand, his foot, and when it looked like his limbs were being eaten by stone, he walked through himself.
The familiar cold of icefire tingled his skin. A strong construction, this one, and he recognised in it the mark of his family. This ward might have been in place since his grandfather had left the palace, and he was the first of his family to walk through it since that time.
The Thillei are coming home.
He could see himself walking up the steps of his mother’s house . . . no, she would come to him, here in the City of Glass, where he sat on the throne his grandfather had been killed defending. His mother would fall to her knees for him.
Your Majesty. Yes, he could get used to that, especially when coming from his mother’s mouth. It was time that she learned who was doing all the work and who had the right to get the top spot.
He had entered another passage which slanted away from the bottom of the stairs at a weak angle. An orange glow of fire or torches flickered at the very end. There were no wall niches, nowhere to hide.
He had not encountered anyone, but if the Eagle Knights still used his grandfather’s wards, they would also use the listening bugs, or would maybe use his grandfather’s famed live model of the palace, as his grandfather had described in the diary. If that was the case, they would know exactly where he was and where he was going.
There was no way of knowing how much the Knights had learned of using icefire, and what devices they were using. And this might all be a trap.
Yet, the children were here. He could feel them close by, perhaps in the chamber ahead.
Fires burned in the hearth at the opposite wall of that room. People moved back and forth, silhouetted against the glow. Some carried heavy things. The figures looked strangely out of proportion, with thick arms and legs, and with large heads. When he came closer, he saw that they were wearing baggy suits. Hoods covered their heads, sealed by a plate of glass in front, through which the occupant of the suit could look out. The low light and the reflection in the glass made it impossible to see their faces. Chevakians needed to wear suits like that when they came to the City of Glass, not southerners . . . unless icefire was extraordinarily strong, like it would be around the Heart. They’re using it. It was clear as it should have been before, when he encountered the sink. The Knights aimed to use this energy they couldn’t see, or, for that matter, control. That’s why they needed the children, as test subjects, as vessels and conduits for icefire. It was such lunacy. The children had no experience with using icefire, plus they weren’t servitors. At crucial moments, they would never do as their masters wanted.
Oh by the skylights, did Rider Cornatan know what he was playing with?
He inched closer to the room, and the more he saw of its interior of tubes and machines, the more he knew he was right.
There was a commotion at the other end of the room. Two suited figures emerged from a doorway, dragging a third person between them. Thin, poorly dressed and not in a suit, the girl looked out of place, as if she’d been caught snooping. But the eyes drew Tandor’s attention. Empty and hollow, they stared straight at him. She knew he was there. Icefire surged through him. He could barely clamp down on the crackling strand of golden light. Down here, he could no longer rely on the Pirosian inability to see icefire. Most of these workers would not be pure-bloods—Pirosians saved the best jobs for themselves; the part-Thilleian guard at the gate attested to that—and some would be able to see the strands, no matter how weakly.
Heart pounding, he leaned against the wall, listening to the girl’s protesting screams. This was one of the Bordertown children. The others would be close by. If he could free just a few, he had the situation in hand. He could turn them into servitors and take possession of the Heart. Once he was there . . . He clutched his dagger to his thigh. The throne would be his. The Thillei would return. The south would again be a force to reckon with.
The two suited figures stopped. They put the girl on a table, and bound her hands to metal loops at the table’s edge.
Another suited figure brought in a trolley on which lay an array of glittering instruments. The three gathered around the girl and covered her with a cloth.
The girl squirmed and bucked. The cloth slid off. The suited men yelled out. One pointed into the corridor.
Tandor released the icefire he had been holding. It crackled across the room in a jet of golden light. It hit the three suited men, knocking them to the ground, ricocheted off the wall, fractured and bounced back, until it formed a barrier across the room’s entrances. Not much good against pure Pirosians, but he had to gamble that none of these people were pure-bloods. Tandor rushed into the room, drawing his knife from his belt. First, he yanked off the helmets of the suited men. If they had Pirosian blood, the bolt would merely have stunned them. He hit each of them hard on the head with the hilt of his dagger.
Then he went to the table.
The girl was thin, filthy, dressed only in a thin tunic. She looked at him, wide-eyed. “You are the man who came to Bordertown . . . The traveller . . .”
He put a finger to her lips and slashed the leather straps which held the girl bound to the table.
“Quiet,” he whispered. “You thought I would leave you alone, did you?”
“They said you were dead.” She met his eyes. Oh boy, could he feel the Thilleian blood stir in her.
He lifted the girl off the table.
She almost fell into his arms. Feeling her bony arms and the filth of her skin, a great anger surged through him. “Where are the others?”
Her eyes grew wide. “You can’t get to them. You must get out. They’ll capture you, too.”
“I’ll take that risk. Quick. Where are they? Show me. I’m here to free you all. There will be no second chances.”
The girl hesitated, but pointed at an entrance, a dark maw of a passage leading further into the building.
“That way. There’s a room . . .” She shuddered.
By the skylights, had they been treated that badly?
“Let’s go then.”
The girl stopped where the corridor ended in a t-intersection. Both ends of the new corridor vanished into darkness. Doors were set in the drab walls at regular intervals, all closed.
She pointed at one of the doors, unremarkable as the others. Tandor didn’t need her directions; he could feel the presence of the children, enhanced by the strong glow of icefire beneath his feet. The Heart was close; and it was beating strongly.
“Stand back.” He flung a burst of icefire at the door. It crackled over the smooth surface. The door vibrated and sprang open.
Tandor burst in through the opening before the display of icefire had died down. It was dark in the room, and the stink of human waste made him gag.
Oh by the skylights! He stumbled back out into the corridor staring into that dark maw from which the stench now rolled into the corridor
.
There was a tiny pinprick of light against the back wall. He sensed, rather than saw, the children inside the room; he felt overwhelming pain and misery. They were stirring, mumbling, weak, confused.
Tandor trembled with anger, because the children were not in any state to help him, or to run. Anyone to be turned into a servitor needed to be healthy and willing for the best effect. Tandor was prepared to compromise on the “willing” part, but he couldn’t skimp on the “healthy” as well.
“Any of you who can walk, get up and help the others.” He would get the Eagle Knights for this, oh yes he would.
Sounds of movement—shuffling and scrabbling—came from inside the room. One by one, or in small groups, the children shuffled out. Rags, thin limbs, matted hair, many covered in their own filth. Many of them were wounded, sporting filthy bandages around arms and legs. They stood wide-eyed, blinking against the light. Tandor noticed a boy with a raw scar on his chest, and then another who had a filthy bandage in the same spot.
“What did they do with you?”
They didn’t reply.
He examined the boy’s scar. When he passed his hand over it, a chill went through him. “There’s something underneath. What is it?”
The boy shook his head. He couldn’t speak? Was he afraid to speak? He was not strongly Imperfect, just some of his toes were missing.
He turned to the girl who had brought him here. “What’s been done to them?”
“The Knights put something under the skin. It makes you numb, like him. They were going to do it to me just now, when you came, but I’m one of the last.”
“What is it?”
“I don’t know. One boy opened the wound and took the thing out.”
“What did he take out?” Tandor breathed fast.
The girl went back inside the room and came back with a filthy cloth. “We put it in here, so the men wouldn’t see, but the boy died anyway.”
Tandor folded back the filthy fabric. A clear diamond-shaped piece of glass slid out. As it rolled into his hand, strands of icefire bent and curled, stretching to its glittering surface, and simply disappeared there. The strands tugged at him, at the very power of his being. A low keening sound grew louder and louder.
Tandor snapped the fabric back over the stone. A sink.
All the icefire the children collected would be stored in that stone from where you could mine it but where it was useless to him, unless he could remove the sinks . . . He grabbed his dagger, but knew too well that his grandfather used to neuter Imperfects with sinks. Once the stone was inside the body, removing it always killed the subject. The Knights had outsmarted him.
While he stood there, wracking his brain for a solution, he realised that the children were shuffling in line, as if they knew where to go and were being told to go there.
The Heart.
It would come into full power today, and the sinks in their bodies made that they were attracted to it.
Tandor ran around the corner. The line already stretched into the darkness, slowly shuffling.
He grabbed one of the children by the shoulders. “Stop, stop!”
The girl, a skinny thing no more than twelve years old with empty eyes staring into the distance, pushed him aside as if he was an annoying pup. Already, icefire had made her strong.
Someone had made half-servitors out of them without being properly in control of their minds. Now no one could communicate with them. They would run rampant. Like Ruko.
There was only one thing he could do.
Tandor closed his hand around the Chevakian powder gun in his pocket and pulled it out. The girl next to him gave him no attention. He raised the gun and pointed it at her head. She turned, showing her sweet young face. She had the fine curly hair that was common to the inhabitants of the border regions. Her skin was soft and pale with a few freckles, looking at him like a fox cub.
Fifteen years he had lived as travelling merchant to provide for these children. Many he had saved personally by grabbing the newborn infants from before the hungry mouths of wild bears. While taking them to Bordertown, he had fed them, cradled them, kept them warm. In his mind, he had already assigned them positions in his royal guard, repaying their service, and that of their foster families, many times over.
He loved “his” children. He left the gun sink; the girl shuffled on.
By the skylights, he was too soft, he cared too much, for a job like this. For all his boasting, he was no killer and not even the direst need was going to change that.
Mother, if you wanted this done, why didn’t you do it yourself?
There had to be another way to stop the children.
Find the Heart. Without protection, he would probably die from exposure, but he had to try, or there would be devastation on a grand scale.
Tandor ran.
Ahead in the corridor, the children were going through a doorway from where the smell of must and disuse mingled with strands of icefire.
Tandor followed into an eerie semi-darkness. In the dank room, the ceiling glowed with greenish light, casting harsh shadows on the walls. The floor sloped down in a spiral. Some time, a long time ago, someone had painted white stripes and arrows on the pale grey floor. There was a metal railing in the middle and flakes of coloured paint clung to some of the pillars that supported the roof. Others pillars had collapsed, or melted, causing the roof to collapse. In places, rust flakes piled up on the floor, mixed with bits of black that fell to dust when touched.
Tandor wondered what the old people would have used this construction for, and why this chamber had survived at all.
The call of icefire was stronger here than he had ever felt it in his life. His body sang with power.
He ran down the ramp. Two rounds of the spiral, three. Down, down, down. The light became ever brighter. All the children he passed glowed like beacons. His own skin also glowed, including the hand he never had, superimposed over the pincers of the golden claw. He resisted a look in his trousers to see if that part of him had been restored as well. Then again, he didn’t need to check; he could feel it as he could feel his missing hand, move it and rake his non-existent fingers through his hair.
Around the last bend and his target came into sight.
About the height of two men, and much longer, the thing that was the Heart of the City glowed so intensely white that it was impossible to look at it. The Heart’s shape was vaguely rectangular, and plates of metal lay scattered around it—presumably the protection the Knights had installed and then removed. Some of the casing still remained at the back, but all within was bright white. The air hummed so much that it vibrated in the light, creating an odd shimmering effect.
A single Knight guarded it, clad in a heavy suit, absurdly with a torch in his hand. What blindness that someone couldn’t see this radiance!
Tandor let icefire rise to the tips of his fingers, but it wouldn’t harm the man if he could stand here and had obviously strong Pirosian blood.
This would call for valuable bullets. He felt in the pocket of his cloak, shielding his eyes from the glow of the square in front of him.
At that moment, a shape of light stepped past him. Through the blinding rays, Tandor saw the face of an adolescent man, strong-jawed. Dark hair flowed over his shoulders. The young man hit the knight on the side of the head. The Knight slumped, without having given an indication that he had seen the young man coming. His torch rolled over the ground and went out.
Tandor was puzzled. Who was this young man? Ruko was outside and none of the other children had been older than thirteen.
He turned.
Behind him, all the children coming down the ramp glowed, no longer skinny and filthy, no longer cripple, no longer small. Some
had tossed aside walking sticks. The girl he had rescued from the table had grown to adult size. Her skin was no longer scabbed and dirty, but milky white. Under his eyes, she pulled the tunic over her head and stood there, naked, inviting. She tossed her hair over her shoulder and gave him a mischievous look, very much like Loriane would do, a look that challenged him to do what he could never do. Except now he could.
Loriane appeared in the air before him, naked, alluring. Tandor trembled, tossed by emotions he could by rights no longer feel. Once again he was a complete man, not a pale shade of his former self, damaged by the man he hated most in the world of the living and the dead. He closed the distance between himself and the illusion that wasn’t Loriane, ran his hands along her shoulders. She felt real enough. Goosebumps trailed over her skin.
Oh by the sky lights—what power!
Then he stepped back, forcing the image from his mind. This was an illusion, no matter that is was a very realistic one. Loriane was several floors above him in the birthing room. He was here in a desperate attempt to take control of this device, not to let it take control of him.
Several children sat on the ground, their bodies glowing, crying onto the shoulders of imaginary people they hugged.
Tandor understood. This power shows us our deepest desires. The young man who had just knocked out the Knight had been a boy whose wish it had been to become a strong soldier.
Wasn’t it just disgusting that his deepest desire involved carnal pleasure. He should do better than that.
“Listen, everyone!” he called out. His voice barely rose above the humming of the device. None of the children paid him attention. He shook the shoulders of the nearest girl, who was so absorbed in her dream that she didn’t react, not even when he slapped her in the face.
The young muscular man who wanted to be a soldier just stood there, staring at the brightness, eyes wide open.
They still have their hearts, Tandor reminded himself.
It was unlikely that he could still turn them into servitors, but he had to try. He fumbled for the dagger.