“Where’s Rewfe—” He broke off, one hand diving for the hilt of his sword.
Vinsen didn’t give him time to draw it. He leaped up the steps, twisting to one side as he did so, and grabbed the man’s arm. On any other surface, a hard yank might have done nothing, but on steps filmed over with ice, that sent the guard off-balance. He flailed, lost his footing and went down the steps. Vinsen was past the doorway at once.
The guard almost slammed into the sled as he fought to regain his balance. Without thinking, Maggie darted forward and pushed him. That sent him off the bridge—but his arms had been outstretched, and mailed fingers closed around her sleeve.
If not for the Bleakhaveners’ clothes she wore, he would have dragged her into the lake. The furs came off in his grip, and as Maggie caught the sled’s handlebar, he crashed into the water, spattering her. She wrenched the seal’s carcass off Sheill, and the dog bolted up the steps. Bracing herself with her legs apart, she shoved the sled off the bridge over the point where the guard had gone down.
Water bubbled and gurgled as it closed around the sled, and that sank too. Maggie didn’t know if the weight of the sled had completed the work of keeping the guard below the surface, but at least there was no sign now that they’d ever been on the bridge. She only hoped no one had been watching, because there seemed to be far too many windows.
But when a weight crashed down inside, it wouldn’t have mattered if the entire garrison had leaned out to look. She hurried up the steps, past the crystalline doors. The crash wasn’t repeated, but a stranger sound echoed from inside, a faraway clamor like a crowd cheering.
Turning, she put her back to the wall until her vision became accustomed to the darkness. There had been a second man inside, almost as well armored, but he was on the floor now, and Vinsen wrenched a knife out of his face.
“Are you hurt?” she whispered.
“No.” He got to his feet. “Though I would have been if the dog hadn’t slammed into him and knocked him down. Close the doors.”
Maggie did so. The sound had died down, but she didn’t like the silence either. Another set of crystalline doors was opposite the first, and corridors split off to the left and right of the hall in which they stood. The passages were lit by the windows themselves. From outside, those had been panes of palest grey and opalescent blue that seemed to melt into the ice; from inside, they glowed with a faint radiance.
“Which way to the vault?” Vinsen said abruptly.
Maggie turned to face the left passageway, and only realized a moment later what had happened. “I didn’t mean to do that,” she said, disquieted. Was it the Faith, gaining more of a foothold in her?
“I know.” Vinsen didn’t look any happier. “If we weren’t so pressed for time, I wouldn’t have tried it. Let’s go.”
She hurried to keep up with his long strides. Far behind them, a door slammed open and someone cried out. Just ahead, though, an archway led to a flight of stairs spiraling down.
“You go first,” he said, so she did, Sheill at her heels. The steps were smooth marble, with only a central column of roughened stone to brace herself. There were no more windows, so she went down into a deep and unending darkness. They had to be well beneath the earth by then, though she was too afraid to feel cold.
As she reached the end, one foot slipped and both shot out from under her, but Vinsen caught her before she could fall. Thank the Unity; if she’d landed on her back, that might have put paid to the flute. He steadied her, then let her go so he could light a candle. In the tiny glow—so small compared to the windows above, and yet the only warmth in the fortress—she saw what she’d led them to.
A wall of ice, blank and blue, looking as though it had been hewn from a glacier. Perhaps ten feet separated it from the foot of the stairs, and there was nowhere else to go. This is the vault?
“Maggie?” Vinsen turned to her. “Can you hold the candle?”
He couldn’t use his left arm, Maggie realized at once. She took the candle while Vinsen ran a hand over the surface of the slab. Sheill nosed at it, but there didn’t seem to be so much as a hairline fracture to suggest a door. A drop of water ran down it where the flame was closest, but the rest radiated cold.
“I have to call on you again.” Vinsen took the candle from her. Maggie set down her pack and drew the flute from it.
Overhead, so far that they sounded like leaves falling, footfalls started down the stairs.
She clenched her hands, as much to stop her fingers trembling as to limber them up, then brought the mouthpiece to her lips. She was breathing too fast, and the first few notes were strengthless; whispers would have been louder. The footsteps certainly were.
“Close your eyes,” Vinsen said, “and pretend you’re at home. You’re safe. You’re with your family, and they’re playing too—can you hear it?”
Yes. She positioned them around her in her mind’s eye—her father at his harpsichord, her sister with a drum. A pang of homesickness stung her, but she swallowed that as she thought of the music. “The Descent”, the triumphant song of how the Unity had come to Eden.
The lilting trill of the harpsichord rose into a crescendo, the drumbeats that underpinned it speeding up to match, and she brought the flute in, pouring all her fear and hope and longing into the music, deepening the intensity. She thought of Skybeyond, a slim granite tower rising to the clouds, and it opened for the Unity, for a power that could not be denied. Just as the vault would open for her.
There was no whipcrack of ice splitting, only a sound softer than a sigh. She couldn’t be sure whether it had come from the vault itself or from Vinsen, but he touched her arm and the spell broke. She blinked. The great slab of ice had turned to a mass of mist so thick it didn’t reveal anything that lay beyond it.
Sheill took a cautious sniff, then padded in before either of them could say anything. The cloud swallowed her up. Vinsen took one last look at the stairs.
“Take the candle,” he said. “I want to have my hand free. Then go in.”
She didn’t particularly want to walk into the mist, but that might be safer than facing the Bleakhaveners. So she took the candle in her free hand and walked into an opaque swirling coldness that settled on every inch of exposed skin like dew. Keeping her eyes open was an effort.
Vinsen followed, and in five paces they were out of the mist, though the candle’s glow was so tiny it illuminated nothing. He quickly moved away—perhaps to cut down the pursuing Bleakhaveners as they emerged from the mist. She wondered whether to play again and will the mist to harden into ice.
A sound echoing through the depths stopped her. It was a soft concerted rush like waves lapping gently at a smooth shore, coming from whatever lay just before them. As though the darkness itself was breathing.
Chapter Eleven
Faithless
“Vinsen?” she said, fighting to keep the fear out of her voice. One candle was nowhere near enough to light the vastness of the vault, and Sheill had disappeared into the dark as well.
“I’m here.” Thank the Unity. “I wish we had more candles.”
Damn it all, she had left her pack outside. She bit her lip, then thought, why not? Each time she’d used the Faith, it had been easier, after all. Stooping, she pressed the candle into a drop of spilled wax on the floor, then straightened up and positioned her flute.
“What are you—” Vinsen began.
Give me the sun, she thought and played a swift falling glissando. A surge of strength flowed through her like strange wine, but what gave light to the vault wasn’t the sun.
Instead, the roof opened as if the moon had descended on it, glowing pale with a dazzling purity, white fire reflecting off snow. Vinsen drew in his breath, flinging up a hand to shield his eyes, but as vibrant echoes shivered away into silence, the light dimmed slightly as well. There was enough for her to see, enough to light ever
y corner of the vault, but it was no longer so painful.
Maggie wasn’t sure what she had expected the source of the Faith to be. She was certain of only one thing—it wasn’t likely to be small as the gem she’d imagined the Unity was, because if that was the case, the man who controlled the Faith could simply have worn it. So the source had to be larger, perhaps something which couldn’t be easily carried—and she’d lost the sled, their one means of transport.
But when her eyes adapted and she saw what filled the vault, she forgot everything else.
Forty or fifty people knelt on the bare floor, close together so their shoulders touched. Boys and girls of all ages were among them, but the smallest children made no more sound than anyone else did. Except for their breathing. That was the wavelike sound, the audible sigh of so many people exhaling in unison, magnified in the confines of the vault.
Sheill stuck her muzzle out and sniffed at the nearest person, a little girl with a brown-blazed face. The girl didn’t so much as blink.
“Are they alive?” Vinsen said.
His voice made her jump; she’d forgotten for a moment that he was there. She moved towards him without looking away from the crowd, and felt a little better when she was next to him.
“They must be,” she said. “I mean—why store corpses in a vault?” Though there was no smell of rank bodies or full chamber pots. The floor was so clean she could have eaten off it, had there been a crumb in sight. Strangest of all was the way the people didn’t seem to notice her or Vinsen.
Maybe they looked like Bleakhaveners, with the painted-on blazes, so she wetted a once-clean handkerchief and rubbed it down the right side of her face, though from the state of her handkerchief, that only smeared the brown ink. She cleared her throat.
“My name is Maggie Juell, of Denalay,” she said. “Can any of you speak to us?”
Vinsen moved forward. “If they’re guarding the source, we’ll have—”
“No.” Maggie’s heart sank. “I think they are the source.”
“What?” Vinsen said. “They all look like—like effigies or empty shells.”
“That’s why.” She understood now. “Everything inside, drained away to fuel the—”
Someone walked through the mist where the door of the vault had been, and Vinsen turned, drawing his knife. He moved between her and the man who stepped in.
The man seemed to see them at the same time. He was powerfully muscled, and his face set tight, the blaze so dark it was like brown ink. Ruay followed him, then stopped in her tracks.
“Is that him, Ruay?” The man drew a knife too—a blade as wickedly sharp as a flenser. The moonlight from the ceiling danced along the edge. “Captain Solarcis?” he said, as if biting each syllable off.
Ruay turned to them, her eyes wide. “How—how did you get in here?”
That was their one advantage, the fact that the two Bleakhaveners were caught off-guard and startled by what had been concealed in the vault. “He’s not the only one who controls the Faith.” Maggie inclined her head at the people who sat rank on rank in silent stupor, motionless as tiles in a mosaic. “I think they’re supplying enough for both of us.”
Ruay looked torn between incredulity and revulsion. “How could you have anything to do with the Faith?”
Maggie showed them her flute, holding it between her thumb and two fingers in a way she desperately hoped was casual. As though she had known the power it could direct and focus all along, and as if that was very little compared to everything else she could do.
“This channels the Faith,” she said. “And it’s getting easier every time.”
The man’s lips drew back from his teeth. “You lying, blaspheming bitch. As if a little stick—”
“Call her that once more and I’ll kill you,” Vinsen said.
He spoke so calmly that Maggie wasn’t sure she had heard the words right, and the man looked equally taken aback. Unity, no. The last thing they could afford was a fight; not only would that delay them until more Bleakhaveners arrived, but she didn’t want Vinsen to be hurt.
Especially not defending her over an insult. She hadn’t expected that any more than she’d been prepared for her own reaction—a strange mixture of pleasure and embarrassment and a sense of safety. None of which she wanted or needed now, if ever.
She quickly steered matters back on to a more reasonable course, hoping the Bleakhaveners could be made to see sense. “If I have no power over the Faith, how did we escape from the hollows? How did we get past that door?” Pause. Rests, the short intervals of dramatic silence, were important in music. “Whether you like it or not, whether you know it or not, I can do this.”
The Bleakhaveners said nothing, and she couldn’t tell anything from their faces. Time was running out. If they—
“Ruay.” Vinsen’s voice cut through the tense stillness, although he didn’t speak loudly. “You remember how I asked you about parlor tricks on my ship?”
She didn’t answer, but from the flicker in her eyes, something had finally broken through. Vinsen went on. “Small things at first, little changes. You said your master wouldn’t waste Faith on those, because it would be an insult to the people who’d given so much of themselves to create the Faith in the first place, and you were right. At that point, we didn’t know the Faith could be manipulated through music. But now we do.”
“How?” Ruay’s response was no louder than a released breath. “I could believe she did that, because there’s no way the two of you would be here otherwise unless you had magic of your own. But why have we never heard about such a thing before? Why has it never happened in Bleakhaven?”
“Do you not have flutes?” Maggie ventured. “Or pipes?” The man gave her a witheringly scornful glare.
“Does it matter?” Vinsen asked. “We’re wasting time. All you need to know is, she can control the Faith.”
The man’s gaze dropped to Maggie’s flute. “Not if we take that stick off her.”
“Try it,” Vinsen said.
“Artek.” Ruay had taken a few steps closer to the people, moving as though she was sleepwalking, but at the threat she turned. “Even if we took it, how can we help them? Look at them.”
The man’s throat moved as he swallowed, which told Maggie he’d seen the people once when he’d stepped into the vault, and had no desire to repeat the experience. “We could make damn sure some foreign—woman doesn’t come anywhere near them, for a start.”
“Do you know any of them, Ruay?” Maggie asked. “Do you recognize them?” There was no reply, but that in itself was an answer. “I can take them somewhere they’ll be safe.”
“What are you—” Artek shook his head. “What makes you think they’ll follow you? And if you take them away, the Eldred won’t be able to—”
“That’s the whole point,” Vinsen cut in. “We want him to stop sending this Faith against us, and we can get that if we take those people away. The question is, what do you want? To keep using them until there’s nothing left?”
Maggie hadn’t considered the possibility there would eventually be nothing left of the people, physically as well as mentally. Disquieted, she tried to see what lay beneath their furs and rough-spun wool. Those were shapeless, but their faces weren’t. She’d been so stunned by the blankness in their eyes that she hadn’t seen how gaunt they were—they all seemed half-starved, as though the Faith had run out of minds to consume and was starting on their bodies.
And from Ruay’s haunted look, she’d realized that too. Artek had lowered his knife, so Maggie took a deliberate pace forward. She couldn’t reach the two Bleakhaveners with Vinsen as a barrier between her and them.
“Even if draining them endlessly for the Faith won’t kill them, they were kept—” She paused. “No, stored down here like roots in a cellar.” Vinsen grimaced as though he didn’t like that comparison, but she continu
ed without pause. “I willed that light into existence, with the Faith, so I could see them. They were trapped here in the dark, without food or freedom.”
Artek looked at her with equal parts suspicion and dislike. “How can we be sure you’ll do any better by them?”
“She could hardly do worse,” Vinsen shot back.
“She could lead them all into the sea. What better way to make sure the Eldred won’t be able to reclaim them?”
Maggie raised her brows. “I think it should be their choice to be claimed—and whether or not they were willing at the start, did they have any idea they and their children would end up here, like this?” She paused, knowing she had to compromise. No choice about it if she wanted Artek to let them go. “But if you don’t trust me, come with us. I’ll have my hands occupied with the flute. If it looks like I’m about to pipe them all into a crevasse—like what happened to us—you can kill me.”
“Maggie, no.” Vinsen’s voice was low and urgent. “It’s too dangerous.”
“Not if you’re with me.” But in the next moment she realized why he didn’t want her to leave with the Bleakhavener. “You’re not coming?”
That she hadn’t expected. All along, she’d relied on Vinsen, had known without needing to think about it that he would be there to look out for her. He’d shown it from the moment he’d had her bundled into a rowboat to be sent to safety while he went down with his ship.
Now, though, she realized exactly what he wanted—a two-pronged strike, with her removing the source of the Faith while he dealt with its master. Which meant if she allowed Artek to come with her, she’d be alone with a Bleakhavener who’d looked at her with murder in his eyes.
A Bleakhavener likely to take advantage of any fear on her part, so she couldn’t show she was afraid. Most of all, Vinsen didn’t need to be concerned on her behalf. He had enough on his plate already.
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