by H. D. Gordon
Theo bowed once more to his king and followed Surah out into the hallway, shutting the oak doors behind him with a small flick of his wrist. “It’s very generous for you to offer your assistance, princess,” he said, holding an elbow out to her.
Despite her unfounded dislike of him, Surah laced her arm through his so he could lead her out of her father’s quarters, where they would be able to teleport to their destination. For protection reasons, one could not teleport into Syrian’s dwellings, only out. And though Surah would rather not make physical contact with the Head Hunter, she knew well enough what was expected of her. Theodine was a Knight, and to disrespect him by refusing his arm would be plainly rude. It was one of the reasons she dreamed of leaving this place, even though she knew she could never live any more lavishly than she did in her father’s kingdom. Too many appearances to hold up. Too many expectations. Too many secrets and shadowed sad times between these walls.
The hallway was dimly lit; no windows or points of entry save for the two arched doors at the end of the hall. Surah did not respond to Theo’s comment about her generosity. She got the feeling that he knew as well as she did that he had not given her much choice with his charging in and saying how she was needed to question the Hunters, probably to help solve the murder, too. It was an understandable request. One of Surah’s gifts, that both her lost sister and brother had shared, was being able to detect lies from most people, but that didn’t mean she liked the way Theo had pulled her into this. She didn’t like it at all.
Theo’s wrist flicked again and the arched doors leading to the foyer swung open. The foyer was a large room, one of fourteen in the beast of a structure that was her father’s castle. The ceiling towered thirty feet overhead, painted with a mural of a dark storm just rolling in. The bruised clouds seemed to sweep over the ceiling as if to swallow it, and the room was as poorly lit as the hallway they’d just emerged from. But the mural was no longer a comfort to Surah, just like the night black walls which held no windows were no longer, even though they used to be when she was a little girl. She could still remember when it had been painted. She’d been only a handful of years at the time. Syris and Syra had stood to either side of her, their necks craned back the same as hers.
“It looks like it could pour rain down on us at any second,” Syris had said.
His sisters had nodded, wide purple eyes still glued to the ceiling. Syra had leaned in a little, pitching her voice low so that the artist still finishing the mural wouldn’t hear her. “I don’t like it,” she’d said.
Surah had smiled at her older sister. “I do.”
“May I inquire something, princess?” Theo asked, pulling Surah out of her memories.
Surah restrained a sigh and nodded. People were always asking permission to “inquire” things, as though she weren’t as accessible as any of them just because she was princess, the next and only person in line to the throne. No one just spoke freely to her like she was a real person. In her earlier youth, this had made her smug and conceited, made her think they should behave that way because she wasn’t like them; she was better than them. But those feelings had long since faded, and her soul had grown humble and weary of the treatment. Now that Syris was gone, her father was the only one left who said whatever he felt to her. She wondered briefly if her life would always be that way. It was a surprisingly sad little thought.
Theo’s eyes were on her. She could feel them. “Are you going to accept the position as Keeper?” he asked.
She lied without hesitation, smoothly. “I don’t know.”
Theo was silent for a moment, his hand resting on hers where she had her arm laced through his. This was one of the reasons she always wore gloves and long sleeves; so she wouldn’t have to touch the skin of those who always wanted to escort her about, and she had reasons for this that were not as conceited as they may sound. She was a princess, not an old lady crossing the street. She was pretty sure she could walk without everyone’s assistance.
“It would make me very happy if you did, my lady,” Theo said, his tone pitching low, his gray eyes lowering in a rare show of uncertainty.
When he said things like this, which he did a good portion of the time, Surah felt bad about her unexplained dislike of him. He was, after all, a Knight who had fought for her father and done his bidding for hundreds of years. She had known him since they were both children, and nearly every eligible woman in the kingdom would cut off a finger to be with him. Handsome, charming, intelligent, strong. It wasn’t hard to see why, and Surah refused to believe her aversion to him was because of the small thing he’d done when they were children. When you lived as long as they did, everyone did questionable things at one point or another. She certainly had a fair share of her own. But, still…
Surah smiled her practiced smile. It wasn’t difficult. “Thank you, Hunter Gray,” she said. “I suppose we shall just have to see.”
He had never, in all the years they’d known each other, asked her to call him Theo, but she knew he wished she would. She never did, not because she wanted to upset him, but because she felt as though he was just waiting for that kind of invitation, and she had no desire to encourage him.
Theo said nothing to this, only continued to look down at her from his taller position. Surah decided it would be best to get back to the business at hand. “Where are we going?” she asked.
It was a question she already knew the answer to, and Theo knew this, but he answered dutifully, letting the subject drop. “The Hunters who are stationed at Black Mountain are not allowed to leave their posts, my lady, so the two that were on watch tonight are waiting for us there.”
They were across the large foyer now, where five Hunters were guarding the Travel Room. They stood silent in their black cloaks, arms at their sides and faces unmoving. Two on each side of the door to the room, and one directly in front of it. Theo nodded to the one in the middle, and the Hunter twisted his wrist and the door slid open. Then he stepped to the side so Surah and Theo could enter, bowing as they passed.
It was just a small, square room, not much bigger than an elevator, the walls and ceiling all black, with a plush purple carpet on the floor. This was one of only five places in the castle where teleportation wasn’t blocked, and it could only be used two at a time. Surah and her father were the only ones who were allowed to teleport freely in the castle.
In front of them, the door slid closed. Much later, Surah would wish she had never stepped into the room in the first place. Had she stuck to her guns, and refused a hand in all this, so much could have been avoided. Maybe.
Theodine held out a hand to the princess, a crooked smile on his face that made Surah sigh mentally. She didn’t need the help teleporting any more than she needed the help walking, but there were those pesky expectations; obligations, really, so she placed her hand in his without hesitation, offering her royal smile as she did so.
Someday I will shed the mask, she thought. Someday.
CHAPTER 4
Teleporting would be a strange thing for a first-timer, and most people could never even do it, but Surah had learned and mastered the Magic when she had been just a child, so the feeling of vertigo and nausea no longer invaded her as they moved across space and time. She was here, and then she was there. Simple as that.
The night stars hung overhead, a thick glitter that was not visible in the part of her father’s kingdom where she called home. Too many lights on the ground to see the lights in sky. But here was country, a land where only the farmers and their grasses, the Hunters and their mountain lived. Here was a land where the Beasts still roamed in the forests, where the night wind whispered the wishes of star-crossed lovers, where the Magic was still used for survival, not show or pride. Here was where the stars were allowed to shine.
She had only been here a handful of times, as her life demanded most of her time be spent in the city where her father’s castle was. But sometimes she dreamed of this land, could see it through the eyes of a broken
young girl, could see her sister’s face as it had been so many years ago. Battles of the Great War had been fought here, back before the dividing of the Territories, and it was fair to say the land had acquired a haunted feel, as so many places where great death is wrought do. Surah knew this was the reason her father had built his city on the other large expanse of land that belonged to the Sorcerers, but even with the memories of Syra and her mother, she liked it here. Things were simpler here. You could see the stars.
Ahead was the Dark Mountain, living up to its name under the black glittered sky. The towering peaks seemed not to hold shadows, but rather to birth them, and a perpetual storm cloud seemed to hang not over the mountain, but around it. Jutting rocks the color of midnight scraped the air some twenty-thousand feet high, and a base for the Hunters who guarded the place was just a row of squat black buildings at the foot of it. A cast iron fence ringed the area, where admittance was only allowed to select few. The place was as impenetrable as a place could be, and for good reason. The Dark Mountain was where the Black Stone lived, or where it had lived, before it had gone missing; which Surah still hoped was some sort of stupid mistake. She couldn’t even steal the Stone if she wanted to, and not only was she the princess, but she was more powerful than most when it came to the Magic.
If it was indeed gone, great trouble lay ahead. The Black Stone, unlike its brother, the White Stone, could be used only for Black Magic, for bad deeds. In nearly a thousand years, she had never even seen the thing, nor would she want to. Only the people who guarded it saw it, which was why this interrogation would not be a pleasant thing. Prolonged exposure to the Stone had a way of…shaping a person.
Theo still held her hand and he began walking her over the rich green grasses toward the mountain. She slipped her arm through his when he offered his elbow again, and ignored the tightening of her stomach the way she had learned to ignore most emotional impulses over the years.
“Don’t be afraid, my lady,” Theodine said, looking down at her with his crooked grin.
Surah didn’t respond to this. She stared straight ahead and clenched her teeth. The pride that she felt the need to assert when she was younger had faded away along with the rest of the things that fade away with time.
He led her toward the gates where two Hunters in their black cloaks stood to either side, their faces as stone as the mountain that loomed behind them. They recognized the Head Hunter and their princess immediately and bowed to first Surah, and then him. Theo inclined his head and the gates swung open, stirring the humid air that had caused a thin fog to sit over the land.
Surah’s black hood was drawn up over her head, hiding her lavender hair from view and casting much of her smooth face in shadows. The Hunters here, all men, had not seen a woman in Gods knew how long. They made great sacrifices for their people, and she did not want to entice them unnecessarily.
The two of them, arm in arm, crossed the land that had gone barren under their feet, the grasses ending abruptly in dry brown dirt. They approached the foot of the Dark Mountain, which seemed to pulse something that made Surah’s heart quicken, her breath fall short; like waves of tingling electricity that would eventually run you dry or run you completely.
Somehow, though the settings were as different as two settings could be, the feel of the place had the same as that of the Silver City that belonged to the Vampires and Wolves after she had watched their revolution take place there. The air here was warm, not frigid and cold, and the Mountain was dark like its name, not all white and silver with snow, as the Silver City had been, but yes, the feel was the same. Darkness. Pain. Death.
Surah nodded to all the Hunters they passed, who nodded in return and followed her with eyes that hung in the shadows of their hoods. As they reached an opening in the Mountain, five Hunters guarding the entrance stepped to the sides, allowing them to pass, allowing the Mountain to swallow them.
There were no shadows in here, for not even shadows could live in such complete darkness. Surah restrained herself from casting a Light Sphere in front of her, mostly because of Theo’s comment about being scared. After a few moments in the void of blackness, Theo snapped his fingers and a sphere of light, a baseball-sized thing that swirled perpetually like the eye of a hurricane, appeared in front of them. It lit up that little crooked grin on his face, as if he knew she had not cast her own light just to prove a point.
This annoyed her a touch.
“Where are they?” she asked, deciding the silence between the two of them was too much in this small, dark space. Too intimate.
Still grinning, Theo nodded his head forward, sending the Light Sphere down the tunnel ahead of them. The shadows scuttled away from it like insects.
“Just around that bend, my lady. They’ve prepared a room for us. The Hunters who last saw the Stone will be there.”
Surah had already begun to move forward, and she wished that she could fling Theo’s arm away and walk independently. She didn’t.
When they reached the room–which was no more than a small rounded cavern with three burning torches hanging on the wall–they found the two Hunters in question seated at a small, old table. It just barely fit in the small room with its four chairs. The two chairs opposite the Hunters were empty, and Surah inclined her head, making one of them slide back from the table before Theo could pull it out for her. She took a seat. Theo stood a moment, then did the same.
Surah pushed her cloak off her head, revealing her lavender curls and partially shaved head. She raised her chin, her violet eyes settling on the Hunters. “I am Surah Stormsong,” she said.
Both Hunters nodded in unison, obviously aware of who she was, and said, “My lady.”
“May I have your names, sirs?”
Both men were stocky and wide-shouldered. Their hair was cut close and their eyes were black, like midnight and ink, as were all the Hunters’ stationed at the Dark Mountain. Working so close to the Black Stone had its effects, but it was a necessary and honorable duty to uphold. Whether they were suspect or not, they deserved their princess’s respect.
The one on the left answered first. “Rand Fishwell,” he said.
Surah nodded. Common name.
The one on the right said, “Brim Ironwater.”
Another nod, slightly less common name, but still common.
“Can you tell me what happened Sir Fishwell, Sir Ironwater?” she asked.
“Wish there was more to tell, my lady,” said Fishwell. “I went in at eleven to check on the Stone and it was there.” His black eyes flicked to the other Hunter. “When Ironwater went in at midnight it was gone.”
Surah sat back in her chair, sure to keep the dread of what she had to do next off her face. She slid the glove off her right hand.
“May I ask you a question, my lady?” said Ironwater.
Theo shot the Hunter a glare, and Surah decided she liked Ironwater for not flinching. She nodded, curious. “Of course.”
“Are you going to be the new Keeper?”
Surah smiled. Her princess smile. On second thought, she should have declined his request. “That matter has not been decided, sir,” she said, and placed her ungloved right hand on the table, palm up. Ironwater sighed and placed his rough hand in hers.
Surah took a deep, silent breath and let it out. She could already feel the darkness in the Hunter that was a result of years spent near the Black Stone. It was a feeling that quite simply sucked the light out of the world. “Now tell me again, please,” she said.
Ironwater nodded. He repeated the story that Fishwell had told. Surah knew the way she always knew that he was telling the truth. She released her hold on his hand and patted it gently, then offered hers to Fishwell.
Same story. Same results. The two Hunters were telling the truth.
Surah sat back in her chair once more, giving Theo a nod that confirmed their stories. She bit the inside of her bottom lip a little as she wondered what she was supposed to do next, and wished for what seemed like the thous
andth time in the past month that her brother were here. Keeper was Syris’s job, and he had been good at it. She hadn’t the slightest clue as to how to lead an investigation of this magnitude, or any magnitude, for that matter. She had a feeling it was going to be a very long day.
“The room that held the Stone,” she said. “Has it been searched?”
Theo answered. “Of course, my lady. I searched it myself before I came to King Syrian. There is nothing there.”
The way he said this made Surah’s back rise a little, as though this were a silly question, as if to point out that she didn’t know what she was doing. Or maybe she was just defensive because she didn’t know what she was doing. There had been no implication in the Head Hunter’s tone. This was why she could never figure out if she disliked him for warranted reasons or not.
Surah stood from her seat, and the three men followed suit. “Thank you for your cooperation,” she told the two Hunters. Then she turned and left the room, pulling her hood back over her head, the heels of her boots clicking on the hard earth and bouncing off the black walls of the tunnel. Theo followed right at her heels.
“What next, my lady?” he asked, and Surah got the impression that he knew exactly what to do next, and was testing her. Seeing if she was up for the job.
She continued down the tunnel that led out of the Mountain, wanting to be free of its suppressing weight, willfully keeping the snap out of her tone. “Now we go see about Merin Nightborn,” she said, and Theo smiled as if she were a toddler who’d just recited her ABC’s.
The stone that hung around her neck, tucked into her shirt, pulsed against her skin as she thought again about casting a Lightning Bolt at the Head Hunter. Of course, she didn’t. There were other matters to attend to, matters that seemed to be growing moldy and infected and more imminent by the second.
A Highborn was dead and the Black Stone was missing. It didn’t sound like a coincidence to her. Not at all.