by Foz Meadows
‘Where are they?’ she asked. Silence. Her friends only stared at her. Her head still felt muzzy, but she forced herself to speak again. ‘Jess and Electra. Where are they?’
‘There's a bloody good question.’ Evan's voice was bitter. ‘They vanished. Or so Paige says.’
‘They did!’ Paige yelled. ‘One minute, they were lying there on the mattress with that stupid cat, and the next – pop!’ She slapped her hand down on the stone floor, hard. ‘They were gone. Just. Like. That.’
Without meaning to, Solace found herself focusing intently on Harper, particularly the wound on his neck. Reflexively, she licked her lips once more, and then stopped, horrified. Eyes wide, she clapped her free hand to her mouth. As she stared mutely at her friends for confirmation, only Laine could meet her gaze.
‘Yes,’ Laine whispered. ‘It was you.’ She paused. ‘I don't think you remember how we got here. There were Bloodkin in the tunnel. I felt them coming – I tried to call out, but by the time anyone realised what I was talking about, they'd taken Manx and Evan. I fell down the steps – tripped over my own feet, actually, and just about broke my neck in the process. One of them grabbed me, and another ran upstairs. But when he only came back with Paige…’ Her voice tapered off. ‘We didn't have time to talk until we got here. They roped us together, marched us through the pipes – Harper was pretty much dragged – and they walked you away from us. You were very out of it. Laughing. Singing. And you talked to them. And they laughed, too. We didn't know what had happened.’ She swallowed. ‘We thought they'd killed Jess and Electra.’
Solace was breathing heavily. Her vision was blurry, still purring and rippling, but she was fighting it now, straining and stretching her consciousness in order to fully comprehend what was being said. Using them as an anchor, Solace fixed her gaze on Laine's blue eyes, feeling (or imagining she felt) the barest brush of her friend's Trick against her thoughts, like a feather's edge.
‘You're calmer now,’ Laine continued, her face unreadable, ‘but Solace, you've got to stay with us. Jess and Electra are gone. Harper's –’ She looked down at his head in her lap. With a short cough, Harper rolled his neck around and blinked at his assailant.
‘I've been better,’ he croaked, and Solace felt her throat tighten.
‘Harper's wounded,’ she corrected, bluntly. ‘We're somewhere unfamiliar, underground, we're chained to a wall, and if it wasn't for what you and Evan and Sharpsoft told us yesterday none of us would have a single clue as to why.’
‘The key,’ Manx asked, suddenly urgent. ‘Do you still have the key to Starveldt?’
In a moment of panic, Solace plunged her free hand into the pocket of her coat, breathing a sigh of relief when her fingers brushed the cool, familiar metal.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘But I think…’ As the world buzzed and subsided, she closed her eyes, plucked out the key and threw it to Evan, who caught it automatically, one-handed.
‘Hide it,’ she told him. ‘If I go bad again, or maybe it might help.’
Evan looked at her for a moment and then nodded, stowing the key in his pants pocket. Almost as if this had been a signal of some sort, everyone breathed a sigh of relief; all except Paige, who had fallen eerily still and silent, her head turned side-on and down, as if she couldn't bear to look at any of them.
‘I hope Jess and Electra are safe,’ said Evan, into the silence.
‘I wish we were safe,’ said Manx.
It's all my fault, thought Solace, but didn't speak.
For a while, the silence returned, broken only by Harper's laboured breathing, and once, a sob that Paige couldn't quite stifle. Manx, who was closest, reached out a hand in comfort, but she batted him away angrily and turned her face back to the stone.
After an agonising wait, the door creaked open. Solace didn't recognise the grinning, pale-faced man who entered, but the reactions of her friends were evidence enough: this, then, was one of the Bloodkin. Silently, the others watched as he walked over to Solace and undid the manacle from her left wrist. With lightning savagery, he grabbed her by the arm and hauled her up, so suddenly that she cried out.
‘No disobedience, now.’ His voice was low and dry, and when he laughed it was like he'd forgotten how to long ago, the flat utterance sticking in his throat. ‘Your friends, as you've discovered, are quite… attractive.’
As he pushed Solace from the room, she couldn't meet even Laine's eyes.
Beyond the confines of the cell was a long stone corridor, lit on either side by flickering torches. The naked flames blurred and shivered in her vision. She shuddered. It was almost like tripwalking, she realised, which made a twisted kind of sense. If human blood was addictive to her kind, why shouldn't it also have a drug-like effect? She stumbled as a particularly strong pulse of dizziness shook her. Unsympathetically, the anonymous Bloodkin gripped her wrists behind her back, shoving her onwards.
‘Hurry up,’ he rasped. ‘She doesn't like to be kept waiting.’
She?
Another wave of iciness washed over her skin, but this time it was impossible to tell if it was the result of the blood she'd consumed, or a consequence of fear. Surely, there was only one she to whom her captor could be referring.
Sanguisidera. The Bloody Star.
Solace's heart began to beat faster. As the corridor turned and opened up into a massive, cavernous chamber, all she could think of was her idiocy in not only losing her mother's book to Glide, but in failing to read more of it while there'd still been time. She knew too little of Sanguisidera to confront her now, let alone be confronted herself. According to Sharpsoft, this was the woman who'd orchestrated the burning of the warehouse; who'd gutted her family home; whose violence and strength had led to the necessity of Solace's creation. A small part of her knew that these thoughts weren't helping, and so forced her attention elsewhere, to her surroundings. Under different circumstances, Solace might have been awed; instead, she found herself growing angry. It was a poor substitute for level-headedness, but a vast improvement on fear and self-recrimination. Thus steadied, she looked about, and was startled to find herself in the foyer of a different world.
Where under Sydney they were – if, indeed, they weren't in a different realm altogether – was impossible to tell. The cavern was larger than a cathedral by far, a space so enormous that its size was only magnified by the eventual limits imposed on it. High overhead in all directions, the ceiling was swathed in deep darkness, Stygian and unreachable, making it seem that anyone who went near enough would wake a horrendous cloud of bats. The same pattern of lit torches illuminated the lower parts of the walls, while ornate candelabra lined an avenue through the massive chamber. On either side of this promenade, arranged about the floor or draped over higher protrusions – for the floor here was bare, uneven rock, like the walls themselves – were hundreds of lounges, rugs, cushions, chaise longue suites, carved wooden chairs, settees and ottomans, all slightly faded with use but nonetheless beautiful and clearly antique. The colour-theme was red, marked here and there with gold, mulberry, green, brown and blue in the various weavings and fabrics, but dominated overall by crimson, scarlet, vermilion, burgundy. Some walls were even hung with tapestries between the torches, depicting scenes which Solace couldn't make out, and in any case had no heart to; for the room was far from empty.
At a glance, it was impossible to tell whether the myriad occupants of Sanguisidera's hall were exclusively Bloodkin, or if some other Rare filled the throng. Every item of furniture which could be sat upon or lounged against was, and in between lurked others, slouched on the floor or leaning against the wall, talking among themselves, dozing, sleeping, laughing, drinking. To the effect of this last, there were many decanters in evidence, wrought finely of crystal, metal and glass, which were passed around and drunk from, and as soon as she had noticed this, the overpowering, copper-salt smell of their contents rushed straight to Solace's head, and a new wave of hallucinogenic splendour assailed her senses. For an instant
it seemed that every single being in the room looked her way, blinked, stared, and smiled in a piercing moment of utter silence. Then the world flooded back to normal; the noise resumed, and Solace was left feeling dwarfed by the comparison. In reality, nobody was paying her any mind – for those assembled, it might have been any other day, and probably was. But Solace's attention soon became fixed on a distant, vital point – a raised promontory of rock jutting outwards and upwards from the cavern floor like the horn of a submerged behemoth, and she knew, without needing to see, who sat enthroned at the summit.
‘That's her, all right,’ the Bloodkin behind her whispered malevolently. ‘And she has been waiting to meet you.’
A few more steps forward, and the size of the chamber seemed to double: they had reached what Solace now realised was the top of a rise, and for an instant she saw the whole of Sanguisidera's beautiful, terrible, barbaric court laid out before her, the candle-lined walkway snaking down like a ribbon of light to the foot of the protrusion. And then they passed over the rise, and there was no time for looking: all her attention was required to keep her footing on the treacherous slope, which her captor made no easier with his continued shoving.
The more they walked, the more it felt to Solace as if, since leaving the old familiarity of the group home, her life had consisted exclusively of one strange thing after another. To find out not only what she was, but that there were others like her – and to make friends with them! – was odd enough; but the discovery of her parents and Sharpsoft, of Sanguisidera, Lukin, Glide, the Voice in the darkness; of tripwalking and Starveldt – all of it taken together should have been bizarre. But what struck her as the most peculiar thing was how natural it all seemed. The morning after the fire, she remembered running through the same sequence of events and drawing a different, vastly more negative conclusion. Now, thinking back with the clarity that only fear and anger can bring, the truth struck her almost as forcefully as a blow. What she'd said to Manx had been right; and more, it was what she believed in. Almost until that moment, it seemed, she'd been living a shadow-life, devoid of anything to make it real. Without a genuine sense of self, without friends, Solace had been as sketchy and ill-defined a person as if she'd only been drawn on the earth in charcoal, living in constant danger of being washed away in a rainstorm. She'd started to take on form at the warehouse, finding a sense of self, but hadn't yet been complete.
Until now.
Suddenly, she realised the truth of Laine's earlier speech. Without motivation, what were any of them, really? Searching for meaning had been the next best thing, but now, driven for the first time in her life by a genuine sense of purpose, Solace felt more alive than ever before. She wasn't a superhero; she wasn't marked by destiny, fated to live out her days in service to some incomprehensibly higher burden; but she did have a goal. Sanguisidera was her enemy – and that enemy threatened her friends. The reason lay tangled in history, but Solace resolved to untangle it. And if it proved to be a Gordian knot?
She would be a sword.
Just as she had on her first night at the Gadfly, she found herself slip into sync with the world. She was aware of her heartbeat, slow at first, but gradually speeding up, thumping heavily in time with her footfall. Beneath her boots, the loose shale and rock-dust skittered and crunched like the bones of tiny mammals, giving way as the Bloodkin continued to urge her forwards. The air was full of smoke and the coppery scent of blood – thick, warm and animal. Where previously she'd blocked it out, Solace focused on the chatter of the Rare, picked up individual threads of talk or laughter, heard the low rumble of their languid motion pulse through the cavern like waves on a midnight shore. Her own breath felt loud in her throat. A waft of incense tickled her nose, while somewhere a glass tinkled and smashed, scattering myriad tiny crystals across the floor.
It was beautiful. Deadly, bizarre and beautiful.
Walking through the subterranean darkness towards a maniacal enemy, finally self-acknowledged as a vampire, felt real – though uncanny and frightening – as nothing in her human life ever had. Two of her friends were missing, possibly dead, while the others were chained in a dungeon, one of them weak and bleeding from her own bite – and it was real. Each and every damn second.
If Solace had been expecting an exultant feeling of strength and powerful knowledge to come from these revelations, she would have been disappointed. She didn't feel any less frightened or angry; she didn't worry any less for those she cared about. The effects of the blood in her system didn't vanish, and Sanguisidera's cavern didn't seem any less imposing. The only change that had taken place was small and internal: Solace no longer felt as if she ought to be doing something else, or as if at any moment, she would wake up. Her life, now – her life since she'd met her friends – was real, with real consequences. Reality was a frightening, dangerous place to live, she knew, but it also bestowed purpose on those who acknowledged their place in it, and purpose gave her cause for hope where there otherwise might have been none.
It was only a small, internal change. But it mattered.
By now, they'd reached the foot of Sanguisidera's dais. A red and gold carpet was laid down the backwards slope of the plinth, so that Solace's boots made a gentle scuffing sound as she walked. The climb seemed to take forever. Maliciously, the Bloodkin had slowed his pace, as if sensing her desire to hasten the inevitable. Before reaching the summit, however, he released her wrists and thrust her forward so sharply that she almost fell. When she looked back curiously over her shoulder, he only nodded, gesturing onward.
‘Alone,’ he said, and then grinned wickedly. ‘Well. Almost alone.’
And with that confusing threat ringing in her ears, Solace took the final steps upward on the path toward Sanguisidera.
Grief
‘Sharpsoft,’ said Evan.
Nobody paid him any attention.
Turning anxiously on his manacle chain, he stared at Manx. ‘Sharpsoft!’ he hissed.
Manx looked up at him through puzzled eyes, his forehead creased into a frown. ‘Evan, what –’
‘Bloody Sharpsoft!’ he yelled, jolting everyone out of whatever stupor they'd been in.
Three sets of eyes (Harper being unable to turn around) became instantly fixed on him.
When it became apparent that nobody understood what he meant, he swore loudly and exhaled through gritted teeth. ‘He comes when you call! He can bloody well teleport us out of here! Sharpsoft! Sharpsoft! Sharpsoft!’
Silence.
Breathing raggedly, Evan stared intently at the empty space in front of them.
‘He can't hear you, Evan,’ Laine said gently. ‘Or if he can, he can't come.’
‘Or won't,’ Paige muttered.
‘Yeah right! He's always heard me before, and he's hearing me now! He can save us and he knows it, and if he doesn't damn well get his arse in here right this second then he'll be wearing his ribs as a hat! Sharpsoft!’
‘Shut up, Evan!’ roared Manx. ‘You're not helping anyone! You stupid idi –’
‘I'm sorry,’ said Sharpsoft quietly.
If anyone present had picked up a pin and dropped it at that moment, it would have echoed louder than an anvil. Everyone, even Harper, stared. For once, Evan was silent, not venturing so much as a single I told you so.
‘I haven't got much time,’ Sharpsoft continued. His face looked haggard, the flesh of his cheeks sunken in around their high, sharp bones, weird eyes staring prominently from pale sockets. Reaching a hand deep into one of the pockets of his leather jacket, he pulled out a sheaf of papers. Taking a single step forward, he knelt in front of Evan, head bowed, and held them out.
Too stunned to do anything else, Evan took them.
‘Keep them safe,’ Sharpsoft instructed.
Dry-mouthed, Evan nodded, tucking the pages into his pocket.
‘Wait,’ said Laine, as Sharpsoft straightened again. ‘You can get us out of here. Harper's hurt, Solace is in danger – we need –’
�
��I cannot help you.’ It was said so softly, they almost didn't hear. He bowed his head again, concealing his unnatural eyes, but when he looked up again the gold and the silver halves of each iris were whirling hypnotically. Only Laine saw the single tear seeping down the edge of his jaw, vanishing at the junction of coat and neck as if it had never fallen.
‘Forgive me,’ he whispered, and vanished.
For a moment, nobody said anything. Then Paige, who was hunched in a ball, began to cry.
‘He left us,’ said Evan, confused and shocked. ‘Why would he –’
‘Evan,’ Manx interrupted urgently, ‘look.’
In the centre of the dungeon was a ball of weird green light, no bigger than a ten cent coin but spinning faster than the eye could properly make out. Almost immediately, it began to enlarge. A fearful, shrieking buzz filled the room, roaring like the blue light behind the doors in Lukin's tower. The noise was so extreme that everyone clapped their hands to their ears and closed their eyes as a fierce, blinding force seemed to pin them in place. It was like being caught in a hurricane, and with the ball now the size of a small child the light was blinding to the point of pain, generating heat in waves.
Forcing open one eye Manx screamed – his cornea was seared – and as the heat and light and pain and wind and noise grew ever fiercer, he found that he was crying in fear, the tears streaming down his cheeks as Paige sobbed relentlessly in the background.
‘God oh God oh God oh God oh G –’
‘So,’ purred Sanguisidera, ‘this is the daughter of Aaron and Morgause Eleuthera of Starveldt.’
Her throne was ebony inlaid with blood-garnets, and her skin was white and fair, as if she'd been carved from marble. Neck to ankle, she was dressed in the finest, deepest dark-red gown that Solace had ever seen; her hair was all the colours of fire; and the velvet-black eyes set in her exquisite face glittered with madness. Flanking her throne were three men, only one of whom Solace knew by sight. Forcibly, she inclined her head to him.