Sarovy pressed fingertips to his temples. Light bless me, this had best not constitute a breach of secrecy. It’s not my fault we were assigned a foreigner.
He moved to smack his men back into sensibility while the mage worked. The two city guards were huddled against the wall, staring at the frozen soldiers in horror. They would need to be mindwashed too, or word would get around.
“It was a decoy,” Trevere said behind him. Sarovy did not look back; he still had his sword in hand and knew that if he was forced to face the accursed Hunter, he would break the heirloom weapon on that bastard’s red blade.
“I think the goblin set it,” the Hunter continued. “That bitch’s goblin. I caught a glimpse of it in the tavern, but this is definitely Cob’s blood. It carried this rag the whole way then just vanished up that vent…”
“Give your excuses to Jegen,” Sarovy said curtly.
He felt the Hunter’s gaze concentrate at the base of his neck, and tensed himself.
Then a nasty metallic shriek shot through the room, and he flinched and sensed Trevere do the same. Ahead, the drop-gate rose slowly and noisily under the direction of Voorkei’s black-nailed hands. For a moment Sarovy saw past his soldiers, past Voorkei’s voluminous orange mass, to the dark hall and the crowd of tiny black creatures that huddled atop the mangled forms of the city guards that had been trapped outside. Then, like insects scattering before torchlight, they vanished back into the darkness.
A reek of blood and entrails rolled out from the corridor, but beneath that was something worse. Something Sarovy had only caught a whiff of in the tavern: that hollow, cavernous emptiness. Pure Darkness.
Then it was gone and there was just the blood and shit, and the shouts of horror from the stirring men.
And the grating sound of the great door behind them.
He looked back just once. The spikes at the bottom of the door had disengaged from the floor, showing dozens of plated metal feet beyond them, and from the drain in the center of the room, the copper snakes rose en masse.
“Move!” Sarovy roared, and slapped the flat of his sword against the helm of the nearest frozen soldier. The man shook his head as if awaking from a dream. His eyes popped wide, then Sarovy slapped him with it again, on the shoulder. “Watch your step and do not stop for anything! Voorkei, keep lights on all of us at all times! Move! All you idiots, move!”
Someone cursed, someone else made a throttled sound near-puking. “Go!” he shouted at them. “Drag your comrades, leave the dead! Go, go, go!”
Like half-stunned animals, they started to move. He helped them. Trevere was very close, the cursed red blade like a hot poker all too near his side. It was alive, only barely restrained by the hand that held it, and even as he hauled another nauseated boy toward the exit, he was sure he would feel it pierce him.
Then the last man was through and he followed them, fast despite the blood-slick floor, gauntlets slapping the walls, the evil blade in pursuit.
They ran.
*****
The twisting tunnel took Cob and Lark past the undercity twice more. They did not pause long, all too ready to be rid of each other, but Cob knew the memory of those views would stay with him. The fantastic glow amid the deep darkness, the sense of secret life.
He wanted to keep them as images. Dreams. Unexamined, simply admired.
After the windows were gone, they passed intersections. Not many, and most of the side-passages were unlit, but Cob had to wonder how much of Bahlaer was underlain by them. Where did all the tunnels lead? Sewers, basements, vaults?
Their path ended abruptly in a small room with a ladder and a ceiling hatch.
Lark went up first, and Cob found to his red-faced relief that she wore leggings under her skirt. He ducked his head and cleared his throat and fidgeted while she wrestled with the hatch, then clambered after her to peek over the edge.
Crates. Crates all around.
“C’mon,” Lark said, tapping her foot impatiently.
Cob heaved up and looked around as Lark lowered the hatch and kicked a roll of burlap over it. The greenish light from the tunnel disappeared, leaving them in the pitch dark.
“I don’t think this’s—“
“Come on, this way.”
Her hand fumbled for his wrist, then clamped on. He heard her feel around at the edges of the crates for a moment, then she gave a sound of satisfaction and tugged him forward purposefully.
“I can’t see a blasted thing!”
“Shush. You’ll be fine.”
He kept his mouth shut and followed blindly, the weight of the mountains of crates almost tangible around them. Their footfalls were soft scratches in the darkness. He felt like a grig, a vermin-animal creeping around a warehouse in search of scraps.
“Where the pike are—“
“Shh!” Her tug on his arm angled down, and he crouched obediently, puzzled. He heard her sip a short breath, then go silent. He held his breath too and tried to hear past the residual ache in his skull.
A sound. Metal on stone—fast, sharp, echoing faintly through the cavernous underground storehouse. Beneath its staccato, the constant faint jingle of chainmail.
Then light. Nothing nearby, just enough to show him the outlines of the barrels they crouched behind. One flash, then a second. A brief intensification of the sounds—a sudden rushing horde reverberating through the cavern.
Then another flash, and the slow fade of the noise. In the distance, the sharp crack of an order, the words blurred by echoes.
Lark hissed out through her teeth. “Shadow’s Heart, I can’t believe they came down h—“
The pressure in his skull arced up again. He tried to clap his hand over her mouth and got her nose instead. She grabbed his arm and swore at him but he found her mouth that time, and though she bit him, at least she did it quietly.
There was something else in the dark. Something silent.
In his mind’s eye he saw the red sigils lighting one by one up the length of that black blade. His heart lodged in his throat. Twin pinspots of pain burned at his brow and Lark stilled in his grip, hands still clutching his wrists but finally sensing his fear.
Darilan. Right there in the dark, listening for me…
A faint sound. Footstep? Inhalation?
Lark’s hand left his wrist then and latched onto his leg. He flinched, and was even more surprised when she slid her fingers down his calf into his boot. Suddenly it was difficult to concentrate on the invisible, silent enemy approaching through the dark.
She felt around in there for a moment and he thought intensely about kicking her away but then her fingers stopped on something that felt like a stone—something that had been there long enough that he had begun to ignore it. She pulled it out and his hand followed hers, feeling the elegant length of her fingers and the object. An irregular glass sphere with a twist of metal.
“Kiiris shuuven,” she hissed, and it was snatched from their fingers by a swift, tittering rush.
A moment later, their silent stalker swore viciously and the red light ripped into true being. Cob cringed behind the barrels, pain like a fractured web all across his skull, but the glow came no closer. It cut the air a few times, furiously, then the whispers rose like a wave from the blackness.
A shriek of outrage, chillingly inhuman. Another slash of red light. Then the sound of fleeing footsteps and a high, hideous chorus of childlike laughter, moving away.
“Throne, what was that?” Cob whispered, the words thick in his throat.
Lark punched him in the shoulder, hard. “No invoking the Throne, you—“
“Fine. But what—“
“Eiyets. The little shadows. They make the eiyenbridges.”
“How—“
“I saw you put the eiyetakri in your boot. Eiyet-gift, that glass thing. This is why we make them; to call the little shadows. Now come on, we’ve gotta get out of here before the Imperial comes back.”
She had him by the wrist again. He had no id
ea how she navigated in the pitch black but he stood when she tugged at him, and followed along in short-breathed silence. The ache was ebbing, the fear fading, but he wanted out. Out of all of this.
A ramp. A door, unseen in the dark. A hallway, brick-walled and also dark, with tiles underfoot. Another door into a small room with shuttered windows, moonlight slitting through to illuminate the squat shape of an oven and hanging pans—a kitchen.
Another door, opening into an alley.
Cob took a big gulp of outside air. It tasted of smoke and local sewage but more so of freedom. He had never thought he would be claustrophobic but after all that darkness, it was a blessing to be outside.
“Come on,” Lark said, still tugging on his arm. “Safehouse this way.”
They were no longer in the Shadowland; the mosaics on the less-crumbled walls were fish and lizards and wading birds. A few lights gleamed through shutters but no one was on the street here. Through another alley, up a new road, Lark still navigating by the stars for all Cob could tell.
Then they came out onto a new street and he glimpsed a city gate in the distance, and looked around wildly for that white-painted inn. It was nowhere to be seen. Life still lingered here—a few taverns open, some evening traffic—and half of the city gate stood wide, but it was not where he wanted to be.
As Lark dragged him across the street, a cart rumbled up behind them. He turned his head, and his eyes met the driver’s.
*****
“White King,” Lark heard a man say.
Cob collapsed, almost bringing her down too. She gasped and went into a crouch beside him. His eyes were open but only the whites showed, twitching back and forth in their sockets as if in the grip of some violent nightmare.
“Oh Morgwi,” she whispered, and grabbed his arm and belt, meaning to at least drag him off the road. Then the cart rattled to a stop beside them.
She looked up and snapped out a knife as a man swung off the carter’s bench. He was not Jasper—she would have known him—but a short fellow in a coat and cloak, the mother moon’s silver light stealing the red from his unruly hair. His face, sharply vulpine, was unmistakably Corvish.
“I don’t think so,” he said as she raised the knife to throw. He swept his hand at her and suddenly she was flying, light as a feather until she struck the stucco wall across the street.
The breath fled her lungs at the impact. For a moment she was pressed there as if by a giant thumb, and she saw the man staring at her over his pointed fingers, the indifferent horse behind him and Cob still twitching at his feet. Then his hand fell and so did she, dropping into the walled garden of the house she had hit.
She coughed in the dirt and struggled up, bruised and tangled in broken weeds. By the time she hoisted herself over the wall, the man had slung Cob into the back of the cart and was on the bench again. She swung one leg over but he already had the reins. A snap of them and he was on his way.
A familiar grey shape skittered along the wall to her, chirring its distress. Still coughing, she looked to the goblin as it patted her cheek with long, spindly fingers.
“Rian,” she said roughly, then jerked her head after the cart. “Catch them.”
“Ys.”
He leapt off and scampered after, quick as a cat and easily mistaken for one in the dull light. Eyes watering more from humiliation than pain, she watched him chase the cart out silently through the city gate.
Chapter 10 – Reports
It did not take Lark long to reach her destination, though her legs ached and her ego stung from the one-sided fight. The safehouse was nondescript, unmarked—just another shuttered-up former home. She swung up onto the garden wall, grabbed the edge of the second-floor balcony and pulled herself over the rail. No ladder. The place had to look unoccupied.
Inside, thin blades of moonlight cut lines in the darkness. She navigated by memory more than sight; this front room was as it had been when it was abandoned, the furniture now dark broken hulks, the whole place smelling of dust and rot.
No grigs, at least—the biting, lizardlike vermin-birds that infested the drylands. The eiyets kept them away.
Down the stairs and through a beaded curtain that was now mostly strings, into a short hallway. First archway on the left was what had once been a bedroom, now bare but for the pile of old straw and rags that had been the bed. That mess lay on top of a broad rug, and Lark hauled up one edge of it then hooked her foot in the ring of the hatch-door beneath. Pulling that up, she struggled for a moment with the weight, then stepped down carefully to the rungs below.
The shrine beneath the house was small, no more than a hideaway--uncomfortably enclosed and windowless but not dark. Eye-shaped lights spangled the walls, cast from the slitted screen that stood around the three low votive candles on the offering table, the tiny room’s only furnishing. Cayer knelt before it, eiyets draping his head and shoulders like a spiky hooded cloak, all rustling and whispering in their tiny voices. They turned myriad black-bead eyes to Lark as she approached.
“The boy. He’s not with you,” said Cayer, not raising his head. The minimal light carved the scars even deeper into his age-worn face, and he looked tired, angry, but those emotions did not carry over into his voice. It was important to stay calm when communing with the shadows, no matter what.
Lark pressed her hands over her heart and bowed slightly toward the offering table, and at the show of deference the eiyets ceased to stare at her. “No. I’m sorry,” she said. “A mage came. Imperial or some third party, I don’t know. There was nothing I could do.”
“A single mage?”
“Yes. No soldiers or anything. He just… Activated some kind of mentalist trigger, I think, then used magic to cast me away. Didn’t seem to care about my involvement. Rian’s after him, so maybe he’ll manage to report.”
Cayer sighed roughly but did not raise his head. On the offering plate before him, a larger eiyet stood inspecting the big chunk of garnet he had sacrificed. Occasionally it chattered to its fellows in their unintelligible tongue.
Lark settled cross-legged on the stone floor and clasped her hands in her lap. She had sat here many times, watching Cayer perform the rituals and wondering when it would be her turn to take up the reins of the kai. Not that she was eager to take Cayer’s place, though she knew he had tried to groom her for it. He wanted the kai to stay in the hands of unbloods, to serve the business interests instead of those of the family, and had picked her out from the other potential successors because of her connection to the goblins—and despite her age and relatively brief membership.
But though she had memorized every rite he taught her and all the codes of Shadow law, though she had brokered mutually beneficial deals with the goblins and overseen several successful prisoner-exchanges, though she had been vital in holding the locals in check—particularly the southern diaspora--during the Crimson army’s pass-through, she could not seem to please him. The unblood she had displaced as his successor supported her; he ran the protection squads in the Bahlaer Shadowland now, and Lark could tell he was relieved to not have to deal with outsiders anymore. The rest of the dedicated Bah-kai staff seemed to respect her. She did not know what she was doing wrong.
And now she had lost them a possible asset.
“What do we do?” she said.
“The Regency is debating a kill-order on the Imperial threat, so we wait for their word before we act.”
That’s not good, she thought. The Regency ruled in the Shadow God’s absence, and as he was usually absent, that made them the de facto governing body of the Kheri. They were the family side, the god’s most powerful daughters, and no one went against them. Carefully, she said, “I saw the Imperials in the lower depths, though. Had to use an eiyetakri to chase them away. If they’ve already invaded that far…”
Cayer shook his head and flicked a shadow-creature from his brow. The spiky black thing tumbled down to mesh with its companions at his shoulder. “Lured by a goblin, or so I heard. I ne
ed you to tell the goblins that we do not want further conflict. The goblins may consider the depths to be their territory but that does not permit them to orchestrate a massacre.”
Lark’s hands twitched, then clutched together in her lap. For a moment she saw again the frenzied assault on the tavern, the tearing-down of the curtains to prevent Shadow getaways, the blood-stained flash of Crimson swords. They had violated the deal—a deal she had helped to craft alongside the Crimson’s Bahlaeran representative, the houndmaster. Mutual noninterference.
So they had deserved the trap she had set. It had been easy to mop some of the blood off of blank-eyed Cob, after they hauled him through the trapdoor but before they entered the shadowpath. He had been covered in it. Easy to send Rian down with the rag. Bitterness welled in her mouth at the thought that her quick decision put her at odds with the Regency, who sat safe and distant in Oretcht’ke.
“A massacre,” she said tightly. “Like the Imperials did?”
“You know the danger of blood spilt in the shadows. We can not risk awakening the Hungry Dark. The eiyets tore apart the guards who accompanied the Crimsons down. We’ll have to pay blood-price to the city for that.”
A fist clenched in her gut. Dimly she recalled seeing green behind the red in the tavern’s doorway: city guardsmen. Barely participating in the raid, but not stopping it either. The Kheri paid them a good wage to stay out of Shadow business, practically a one-to-one match for their city salaries, and expected certain concessions in return. Certain warnings and assistance.
But likewise, the city guard—and the rest of the city government—expected the Kheri to behave like citizens. The Regency agreed. If her trap had caught guardsmen instead of Crimsons…
“It’s the Imperials who riled them up,” she said, trying to shake off the sick feeling. “They came in and killed shadowbloods. Of course the eiyets would be aggressive.”
Cayer fixed Lark with one pale eye, scar-mapped face showing no sympathy from within its shroud of darkness. “We are the custodians of the little shadows,” he said coldly, “not their apologists. It is our purpose, in Morgwi’s name, to see that they do not run amok, nor to give them cause for violence. And it is your purpose, in treating with the goblins and their allies, to make sure that they do not overstep their bounds in surface politics. We must hold the reins until the Regency or Morgwi himself tells us to loose them.”
The Light of Kerrindryr (The War of Memory Cycle Book 1) Page 22