by Jo Spurrier
It was very strange to feel so foreign in a place in which she’d spent two years of her life — two years that had made her what she was now. Somewhere within the bulk of the great structure were Kell’s dungeons. Among all the hopes and dreams she’d had since she’d broken free of her chains, she’d never imagined coming back.
She set out across the crunching snow and was nearly at the palace steps when she heard boots on the ice behind her, turning to find a dark, looming shadow on her trail.
She felt herself grow tense as Isidro drew near. More than once, he’d tried to apologise for the things he’d said that night on the coast … but it seemed nothing but hollow platitudes when every word was true. She was a fool for thinking that he could come back to her after what she’d done. They might share a tent, eat from the same pots, breathe the same air, but he felt as far away as he’d ever been.
‘Where are you going?’ Isidro said.
Just as she’d feared months ago, he was perfectly civil. She glanced at the fortress. ‘I just … wanted to have a look around.’
‘This early, there won’t be much light to see by,’ he said.
Where I mean to go, daylight doesn’t reach.
Isidro guessed at her thoughts. ‘The dungeons?’
She nodded.
He watched her, head cocked to one side. ‘I … I’ll come with you, if you like.’
She thought of the lightless caverns, full of the smell of blood and despair, and trembled. ‘Actually … I think I’d be glad of the company.’
Side by side, they climbed the ice-covered steps to the charred and twisted wreckage of the main doors. Beyond them, the entry-hall was huge. Overall, the place was far larger than she’d imagined. The palace grounds could hold an army camp or festival crowd. Dozens of trees grew within the walls, branches bowed low under the weight of ice.
Passing through the cavernous entrance, they summoned mage-lights, and Sierra stopped as she craned her head back to peer at the vaulted ceiling, carvings on the dark stone lost to the gloom. One could fit a whole house into the space, or so it seemed to her. A gallery ran around the upper levels, a walkway where archers could look down on people below. Snow lay in deep drifts upon the floor.
Isidro continued a few paces on before glancing back with a quizzical look.
‘Um,’ Sierra said, looking around at the dark stone. ‘I … I don’t know where to go. I was blindfolded when they brought me here.’
‘If Kell took Leandra’s old cells, I know where they are,’ Isidro said. ‘Come this way.’
‘You know your way around?’
‘Mm. My father brought us here each year. We used to run wild through here. He wanted us to know the place like the backs of our hands. It’s the reason we made it out, after.’
Opposite the doors through which they’d come was another grand doorway leading deeper into the palace, flanked by pillars that still bore scraps of gold leaf; but Isidro led her away from them, through a smaller opening to their right and into a long, dark corridor, with their mage-lights the only illumination against the gloom.
Beyond the drifting snow there was nothing to hide the relics of death and destruction. Bare bones lay scattered across the floor, picked over by scavengers. When Isidro turned over a skull with his foot, it revealed a deep gash in the bone from the crown to eye socket. ‘They left the dead to rot,’ he said.
‘I suppose they didn’t care much beyond making sure the Mesentreians couldn’t take it back.’
‘Or maybe they didn’t have the supplies to hold it.’
After some distance through the dark halls, he led her down several flights of steps to a pair of huge, bronze-bound doors, a little battered where they had been pounded open, but still intact. They hung slightly ajar, with a gap just wide enough for a man to slip through.
‘This is the place,’ Isidro said.
It didn’t feel right. The place seemed too small, the doors too … ordinary to be the gateway that haunted her nightmares. Sierra drew a breath to steady herself, and slipped inside.
The moment she crossed the threshold, it hit her: the still, damp air; the smell of hot iron and charred flesh. For a moment, the world seemed to spin around her, and with a flush of power her mage-light blazed brighter, glowing like a tame sun.
Following at her heels, Isidro snorted as though at a foul smell, and his power flared as he cast a shield. ‘I thought it wouldn’t bother me so much now,’ Isidro said. ‘I guess not.’
Sierra led them through the short passage and made a left turn through another stout, metal-bound door. Isidro followed her in silence.
It was exactly as she remembered … a scarred and battered table and benches and wooden shelves fixed to the wall. The books were gone. Kell had taken the valuable ones with him and the Akharians had looted or burned the rest. She walked around the table, trailing one hand along its surface. This was where Rasten gave her lessons. She’d tried to refuse at first, but he beat the defiance out of her until she learnt to submit.
On one side of the chamber a short passage led to a stone-walled cell. Sierra nudged the door open with her boot, and tossed her mage-light inside. ‘This one was mine,’ she said.
Isidro peered in over her shoulder, taking in the bare walls and the simple wooden platform that served as a bed.
On the other side of the main chamber was a matching cell. Sierra had never seen inside it, but when she ventured down the passage to cast her light inside, she saw that it was the same as hers. ‘This one was Rasten’s.’
Then, swallowing hard, she turned to the door on the far side of the room. She’d always dreaded those doors. In the years this place had been her home, she’d avoided even glancing their way. She’d had nightmares about being dragged through them, even after she realised that Kell was profoundly disinterested in her and it was Rasten who was summoned to those chambers night after night.
Isidro seemed to read her thoughts. ‘You don’t have to go in there,’ he said.
‘No, it’s time to lay these cursed ghosts to rest.’ Steeling herself, she shoved the doors open.
Beyond was a comfortable suite of rooms, untouched by looters. First was a sitting room with velvet-cushioned couches arranged around an inlaid table. On the table, and on shelves and pedestals around the room, were statues of marble or gilded metal gleaming richly in the unnaturally steady light. Sierra saw Isidro examine one, only to recoil with a hiss of disgust. They were human figures, exquisitely sculpted, in contortions of agony, faces twisted into incoherent pain.
As Sierra watched, Isidro picked up a piece of snowy, silken marble and hurled it at the wall. It shattered in a rain of fragments.
In silence, Sierra crossed to the doorway covered by a curtain of red velvet with cloth-of-gold ties, mouldering away in the absence of the furnaces’ heat. She peeled it aside to glimpse the room beyond: the bed with four square, solid posts; inlaid chests around the walls; a gilded circle inlaid into the floor; and a heavy beam hanging from the ceiling from chains. Beside it, a stout wooden rack outfitted with leather straps.
She let the curtain fall and left the chambers with Isidro at her heels.
‘They looted the rest of the place,’ she said, ‘but not here.’
‘Can you blame them?’
She didn’t reply as she led him back to the entry-hall. ‘The rest is through here. I need to see it, Issey. I need to be sure … you don’t have to stay.’
‘No, I’ll come with you.’
He was standing so close she had to tip her head back to meet his gaze, but his closeness and his warmth was a comfort. ‘Let’s be quick, then.’
She led him in a swift circuit of the cells, past the workrooms with their racks and shelves of implements, and even visited the crude kitchen. Last, she checked the storerooms where the medicines were kept, but with one breath of the mouldy, green scent she knew that nothing within was worth salvaging.
She emerged again to find Isidro gazing into one of the cells. �
�My father was down here. He was one of the first who went to Kell. Cam and I cursed near ended up here, too.’ He shook himself, and lifted his head. ‘What’s that noise? Sounds like … waves.’
‘I’ll show you,’ Sierra said. ‘This way.’
Between the storerooms and the kitchen was another passage with an old handcart near the entrance. Sierra squeezed around it and led Isidro through to another door, swollen with damp. She shouldered it open with a jolt of power.
‘By the Black Sun herself,’ Isidro said as he followed her onto the loose, sliding stones beyond the door.
It was a sea cave, a little bubble within the rock, sunless but with a sliver of rocky shore. The rest was full of black oily water, and the lapping waves had deposited a rime of ice, milky and slick.
‘This is where we dumped the bodies,’ Sierra said. ‘There are eels down there — great big things, thick as my waist. I hope the filthy creatures starved. It never freezes over — the hot springs under the palace must connect to it, I think.’
‘You’re probably right,’ Isidro said. ‘But I doubt the eels starved. Beasts that big must have more hunting grounds than this.’
‘I suppose so,’ she said with a sigh, and then shook herself. ‘I don’t want anything salvaged from here.’
‘No,’ he said, ‘I agree.’
‘But what do we do? Haul everything out and burn it?’
‘Could do. Might be good for folk to see it destroyed.’
Sierra bit her lip. ‘Maybe …’
As they reached the entrance, she found herself remembering the last time Rasten had brought her through these doors, and how fiercely she’d prayed never to see this place again. Well, it wasn’t too late to grant that wish. She turned to Isidro. ‘I was sure you’d brought me to the wrong place. I remembered it being only a short walk until we were outside.’
‘There’s another entrance nearby, but I wanted to come through the halls to see what had been done to the place. Here, I’ll show you.’ He took her back up the steep stairs before taking another turn to lead her out into the fortress grounds. It had grown lighter since they’d ventured underground, the sky more white now than grey. Nearby, Sierra could hear the sea ice groaning and the distant sound of lapping waves.
She turned back to Isidro. ‘I know. I’ll burn it, like Demon’s Spire, like the fort on the Greenstone. I’ll entomb the cursed place, and then we can forget about it, once and for all.’
Cam shrugged his coat up around his ears as he looked out over the city from the top of the gatehouse. His city, he reminded himself. He might not have sought it, but it was his now. By the Black Sun, I hope I know what I’m doing.
He’d sworn a vow once that he’d never seek the crown. But when Mira first placed his son in his arms, he’d abandoned the vow, and if the Gods cursed him for it, so be it. Refusing his birthright would only pass it to the little lad and make him a target for anyone who wanted a veneer of legitimacy when they made a play for the throne. If breaking a solemn oath was what it took to keep his son from being made a pawn in the game of politics and war, then he’d break a thousand.
Beyond the snow-covered city, ships clustered in the harbour past the ice clinging to the shore. Makaio’s mages had built a pier out of rock to help unload the vessels, and the day before he’d climbed up here to watch the trickle of people returning to the dead city.
For weeks they’d debated what they’d find in Lathayan. No smoke stained the sky over the abandoned city, no soot settled out of the air to blacken the snow. The city was deserted, utterly abandoned.
This morning was different. Wafting smoke rose from dozens of chimneys, the exhalation of a city coming back to life. From this height, he could make out figures weaving through the icy streets, trampling the white snow grey. He’d expected to find Lathayan in ruins, but they’d found more houses standing than not, even if they were settlers’ houses built in the southern style. There would be time to make it theirs.
From above, the city looked peaceful, but within the houses was another matter — they’d been ransacked multiple times and what was left was a hopeless jumble of broken furniture and household goods, tattered rags and rat-chewed leather, perishable relics of lives long gone. The children had already been set to work to sort through it.
The children. It made his heart ache to think of them, even more so now that his household had babes of their own. He couldn’t look at those skinny, chilblained mites without thinking that they’d been someone’s precious child, and that those who had lost them might still be out there somewhere, their hearts torn out each day from not knowing what had become of them — or worse yet, lying dead and forgotten, either here in the north or on the plains of the empire. The lucky ones had forged new families from the ashes of the war and many folk had adopted orphans in honour of their own missing children, comforting themselves with the hope that their own were being cared for by strangers in turn. It was the northern way in times of crisis to pull together to survive.
Cam shook himself, realising he’d been lost in thought for some time. The stonemason was watching him patiently, too diffident to interrupt his reverie. ‘What do you make of it, master mason?’
‘Oh, it can be repaired, sir, but not right away. The ice has gotten into the cracks. We’ll have to wait for it to thaw and take it back to solid stone, but then the repairs will be simple enough. There’s plenty of cut stone wanting use down in the town.’
‘Or perhaps our mages can thaw it out faster,’ Cam said.
The mason flushed. ‘Of course, sir. My apologies, I didn’t think of the mages.’
‘We’ll get used to having them around soon enough. I don’t like leaving these great gaps here any longer than necessary.’
Standing by his shoulder, Ardamon scowled. ‘Time was when you could count on walls to keep invaders off your backs. Now they just slow them down, if you’re lucky.’
‘Better than nothing,’ Cam said, ducking into the tower to head downstairs again. ‘And with our own mages to defend them they won’t fall so easily.’
‘Once they learn their craft, you mean?’ Ardamon said. ‘I hope you’re right. And Cam, I’ve been meaning to ask … what are we going to do about Rasten? Surely we can’t leave that mad dog on the loose.’
Ardamon must have been waiting for a time when Sierra was absent to raise the question. Cam didn’t blame him. ‘He’ll have to be dealt with, I agree,’ he said, but there came a heaviness in his chest when he said the words. Rasten couldn’t be trusted, sooner or later the madness within him was bound to rear its head … but would the folk who looked to him for leadership see it the same way? They’d seen glimpses of Rasten’s darker side, but to them he was still their saviour, the one who’d freed them from their chains. They were too blinded by gratitude to see him for the rabid beast he was. ‘We’ll just have to wait until the time is right.’
Ardamon grunted. ‘First we have to find him, I suppose. He slipped away from the folk you had watching him, even before we put to sea.’
‘Mm. But I doubt he’ll stay hidden for long.’
‘And Sierra? She won’t take it well.’
‘If he slips back to his old ways, she’ll see it was necessary. I hope. Now, what about —’
His words were lost in a great muffled roar. The ground trembled, throwing him and Ardamon both against the curving wall of the tower. Ardamon grabbed Cam by the shoulder and pushed him onwards. ‘Down, quickly, in case the wretched tower collapses! By all the Gods, I told you we ought to have a mage in the royal guard.’
They reached the ground and were out in a few long strides, but the earth still trembled, punctuated by sharp, percussive blasts rippling like the skin of a drum. Outside, the rest of the folk who’d gathered to accompany Cam were staring towards the northwestern quarter, where the earth erupted in hissing jets of steam.
Cam merely glanced to Ardamon. ‘Issey and Sierra — where did they go?’
‘I can hazard a guess. Kell’s
dungeons were in that quarter.’
‘Ah. I suspect were is a good choice of word,’ Cam replied.
They started in that direction, trailed by Cam’s guards and a pair of pages. The ground was still breaking open in whistling jets when they reached the entrance, just as Isidro and Sierra staggered out of the darkness. Isidro had Sierra’s arm flung over his shoulder and his false arm around her waist to bear her up.
‘By the Black Sun! What happened? Is she alright?’
‘She’s overtaxed herself,’ Isidro answered for her as Sierra sank to her knees, breathing hard. ‘She didn’t charge her power first.’
‘What did you do?’ Cam said, crouching down to peer into Sierra’s face.
‘Buried Kell’s dungeons,’ she gasped, gulping as though winded. ‘By all the Gods … I just wanted them gone.’
Cam beckoned the pages over. ‘One of you lads go and fetch her something hot to eat.’
‘Yessir,’ a lad said, and took off at a run, leaving Cam to look around at the haze of steam.
‘When you say “buried” …’ Cam said.
‘Come on,’ Isidro said, turning back towards the palace doors. ‘I’ll show you.’
Signalling Ardamon to stay with Sierra, Cam followed Isidro into the gloom. As they descended the air grew steadily warmer, until it felt as though they were walking into a furnace. Isidro halted on the final flight of steps, above a landing that glowed with an eerie red light, radiating with heat like a forge.
Cam climbed down a few steps more, holding one hand up to shield his face from the heat. The heavy, metal-bound doors were gone — in their place was a featureless glowing slab, a door to nothing and nowhere. ‘That’s … that’s rock?’
Isidro nodded as Cam retreated with a low whistle. ‘I’d been wondering what to do about the wretched place. Issey, can you do it, too? And the other mages? Those breaches in the fort walls need to be repaired.’
‘I can do it. Delphine and Makaio’s mages, too. I’m not so sure about ours, yet.’
‘Alright, that’s one matter solved, then. So what was down there? Did they leave much behind?’