But he hadn’t had to face that day. Seeking to ferret out the source of the Guild’s distress, and wary of the neneckt response to the Treaty of Libourg, the Master had started sending feelers out to Niheba. When his agents returned with tales of the secretive cult that thrived under the waterline, the Guild’s board of elders agreed that something would have to be done about it. The Divided were an unknown variable in a complicated puzzle that couldn’t be solved from hundreds of miles away, and the brotherhood could only be penetrated by someone with very specific qualifications.
Jairus had been more than happy to leap at the chance, even if failure meant certain death at the hands of the seers. They had been hesitant to accept him at first, as was only natural, but once he had proved he was willing to learn from them – and he had indeed learned a great deal – he had become as one of their own. He had quickly ruled out the Divided as the source of the false red iron, but the Guild had asked him to stay, entrenched in the doings of the island, in case he uncovered anything else worthwhile.
Today was the day that he had succeeded. The link was a tenuous one: Bartolo had certainly been lying to him about some or all of what he asked – but it was there, and it would only get stronger as he dug into the affairs of the neneckt that called itself Faidal.
“Good afternoon, miss,” Jairus said, sliding into a seat at a table in an empty pub. His errand to seek out Bartolo’s manservant could wait half an hour or so. “You don’t have any juniper beer today, do you?”
“Not today, love,” said the barmaid with perfume so strong Jairus would have known her anywhere.
“That’s the third time this week,” he complained.
“Ain’t my fault. You should talk to the owner if that’s what you like.”
“I think I will. Would you fetch her for me?”
“In a tick, dear. Have something on the house for your troubles.” It was a well-rehearsed conversation, but the barmaid did a very good job of acting like it was all perfectly natural as she filled a tin mug and plunked it in front of him.
“I wish you’d stop your bellyaching,” Agnise said after he had sat for a short time on his own, sipping the very acceptable substitute for his request. “You’re my most difficult customer.”
“I get a free drink every time you run dry of what I want,” he told her. “Why would I stop?”
“You get free beer because I like you, not because it’s part of the arrangement,” Agnise said, pulling the mug out of his hand and taking a drink of it for herself. Jairus smiled.
“I think I can make up for the trouble this time.”
“Do you?”
“Have you ever heard of a man named Bartolo? A particular favorite of Tiaraku – up until today.”
“Maybe I have,” Agnise said carefully. “Shifty fellow. Fancies himself a lord, or close enough to it. Been underwater a few times, too, from what they tell me.”
“They’re not wrong. I made his acquaintance today. I think you might find it very interesting if you got to know him, too, in your own special way.”
“Would I, now?”
“Just a hunch. He’s a friend of the Warden. Well, I say friend…”
“I see.”
“Bartolo asked me to work on some things for him. I hope to have more details soon, but I probably won’t be able to come back to share them for a while. I just wanted to get you started on what I think is a promising path.”
“I appreciate it,” Agnise told him. “I confess that he’s been of some interest for a while, but I haven’t been able to find a way in. Is there somewhere I can start?”
“Yes. You can help me find a neneckt called Faidal.”
CHAPTER FIVE
The insistent drumbeat that ran though every one of Arran’s nightmares had become a comfort to him: an anchor in the chalky blankness of terror and tears that galloped through his feverish mind. His dreams were scattered and slippery, but his mother was always woven among them, crying out for him, alone and afraid; waiting for him somewhere with open arms. He longed for her, but though he ran and ran to say he was sorry, to console and hold her, the rhythm of the drums quickening its pace as he panted for breaths he couldn’t take, she never seemed anything but impossibly far away.
More than just distance separated them. There was something that always seemed to come between them, but he couldn’t tell what it was. It was beautiful. It was coy and charming and intoxicating, as soft as the whisper of silk when a woman dropped the shield of her garments for his pleasure. It might have been a woman. It might have been something more. He ached for it, even as he cursed it – strained for it, shouted and screamed and begged for it, and railed against it for keeping him from the only person he had ever tried to love.
The beautiful thing consumed him. It sang to him, froze his blood and breathed promises into his ears that obscured the pained, lonely weeping of Elspeth’s ghost, and it was everything he ever wanted just to lose sight of that confusing, depressing, endless obligation in favor of his own selfish satisfaction.
But there were other evils, too, that stalked him in the midnight of his distress. Faceless shapes with shapeless, scar-filled eyes breathing fire at his feet, taunting him as he fled their searing heat. The Siheldi, shredding his flesh with their invisible talons, scooping and sucking him dry as they howled in triumph at the shell of his desiccated corpse. The thunderous ocean under a stormier sky, no lanterns in the world big enough or bright enough to scour away the shadow of what was coming for him.
A terrible, terrible pain in his middle that made the drumbeats sing wildly whenever it touched the surface of his turgid thoughts, echoed by the brush of skin against his lips or cheek or the ashen parchment of his neck. It was an important touch – somehow he knew that. But he shrank away from the understanding of the gesture, since it brought such great agony swimming up to drown him.
Help me, he thought, but he knew no one could hear him. He was alone, and he was frightened, and he wanted his mother to be chasing him instead. He wanted her to catch him, to comfort him and hold him close, to say it was going to be all right. He knew she never would. She never could. He had just betrayed her trust in a way that had changed everything forever, and she did not forgive easily.
What had he done? He couldn’t quite remember. It had something to do with the pain. But didn’t everything?
The beautiful thing had caused it. The beautiful thing had made him think that his suffering was necessary. It was probably right. He was starting to get the impression that leaving this mad place, with its lurid visions that pressed upon his ribcage like the evil hags of legend, would only bring him to something worse.
But something worse was coming, whether he willed it or not. He was floating again, a disembodied soul with little sense of up or down, right or wrong, and he thought maybe, finally, it was the beautiful thing that had him wrapped tightly and firmly in its arms.
Wake up, Arran, it said. Like the sputtering of the volcano that had led him to his fate, and the liquid rock that had burned its light into his unseeing eyes, it called to him. And like a moth helpless against the golden glory of the flame, he drew closer to the curious sound.
Gently as the current of an ancient river longing to rest its drying bones, the thing that wasn’t really beautiful at all reached out its fingers to ensnare him. It was the darkness that was singing to him: a lightless, hopeless place lined in shining ice, and he cried out in dismay as it solidified around him. He didn’t want to go. He didn’t want to leave his mother sobbing in the twilight. He didn’t want to leave the lovely thing that kept him from her. He didn’t want to feel the pain.
But he had no choice. An explosion of iron shards dug into his brain as the agony slammed him into a wall of cold stone and miserable night. His teeth ground hard against something that splintered and cracked, and he couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t breathe, and the drums had stopped, and he was shaking, shaking, convulsing with tremor after tremor of sickening agony as the nightmare h
ags squeezed his faltering heart and laughed, and laughed, and laughed.
“It’s all right, it’s all right,” repeated a murmur on the edge of his hearing. “It’s all right, Arran. Just breathe.”
He didn’t know the voice. Maybe he did. Maybe he had, but he didn’t anymore. He didn’t care. There was blood in his mouth, and blood bubbling up his throat, and the taste of bile and copper and the rare green lightning of the sea. He couldn’t breathe.
A hand stroked his hair as he vomited, holding him securely on his side so he wouldn’t choke on the filth, but he just wanted it to stop. A false comfort. A meaningless nod towards what could never be: someone who cared. He couldn’t move his arm to bat the hand away, though, so he endured it as he endured everything else: in wretched silence as he retched up black blood and putrid phlegm from the rotten core of his wounded chest. He was going to die.
“You’re going to be all right,” the voice soothed, wiping his mouth with a cloth when he had finished, laying his head gently across its lap and trickling a stream of blessedly clean water down his throat. “Lie still.”
He didn’t have the strength to ask who the stranger was. He could barely see the face that loomed above him through the tears that had gathered in his eyes, and he had no memory that would help him piece together the shreds of his uncooperative, cloudy thoughts.
There were things he had to recall. He knew that. Big things. Big, important things to remember, and the stranger was probably one of them. There had been a mountain, and a trap, and fire, and a woman. A real woman. And something nice about her knees.
“I can’t –” he tried to say, but the stranger hushed him.
“Go to sleep,” she said softly. “Real sleep. You must rest.”
There was something about her voice that made it hard to disobey. She had been the one to haul him back into wakefulness, he realized as his eyes started to drop closed. He didn’t want to listen, but now her hand was warm and soft as it rested lightly on his brow. It felt nice, and the pain was ebbing, and he couldn’t stop himself from giving up the fight as his consciousness slipped away into lesser dreams.
Something was angry when he next woke up. There were voices above him. They were quarreling with each other, and he just wanted them to shut up. His head was hurting. Every breath felt like he was drawing molten gold into his lungs. He didn’t really understand how he wasn’t dead yet. The angry voices were making him wish he were.
Was that what he had to remember? He had done something very, very wrong. He had been trying to stop something from happening, and he had been afraid it would make his mother cry.
“Oh,” he breathed, a flat and strangled sound that grated against his eardrums as a sudden flood of remembrance rushed in swirl around his empty head like a swarm of stinging bees. The voices stopped their bickering.
“Arran?” the woman asked, bringing a torch closer to his face. He was still lying across her knees, and the angle from which she looked down at him confuse him again as he tried to puzzle out why she looked familiar. “It’s Faidal,” she said. “Do you remember what happened?”
Arran blinked a few times, but the features didn’t change. Faidal had been a man. Faidal had been a neneckt. Faidal had been Elargwyd first, and they had both tried to kill him.
“I remember,” he tried to say, but he wasn’t sure what actually came out.
“The Siheldi have us,” Faidal told him. “But you’re safe from them here. You need to rest.”
“It’s cold,” he whispered, and she reached over to pull a blanket up to his chin. The wool smelled of stale mold and dry rot, but it helped lessen the chill.
“I’m going to get help for you,” she said.
“You did this,” he murmured, the slurring of the words making him cringe, which in turn made a shudder of pain dart through him. “You brought me here.”
“You can be angry at me later. But you have to hold on. You have to get better, Arran. You have to.”
It was an absurd request, and he hoped she knew it, but he still felt compelled to try. More than ordinarily compelled, even under the circumstances, but he didn’t have the wherewithal to figure out why.
“How?” he managed.
“If there’s one thing the neneckt know better than anyone, it’s the secrets of building flesh from nothing. There are oughon who make a study of it all their lives. Perhaps they know how to rebuild you, too.”
“I’m not a neneckt,” Arran said, the struggle to form each new word and push it out of his mouth making his head chime with a unique, exquisite agony.
“I can’t think of anything else to do.”
“Why haven’t we been eaten?” he asked, feeling rather pleased with himself for identifying what seemed like a pressing concern.
“The Queen wants you alive.”
“She tried to eat me.”
“And I tried to kill you a few times, but that doesn’t mean I really wanted you dead.”
Arran closed his eyes again. “You lost me.”
“Go to sleep,” she sighed. “I’ll figure it out by myself. I always do.”
He didn’t need to be told twice. He barely finished listening to being told once before he had plummeted headfirst into slumber again. When he awoke some indeterminate time later, Faidal, as Faidal was wont to do, had disappeared.
His lap – her lap – had been replaced with a rolled up blanket placed carefully under his neck, and he was actually quite comfortably cocooned in the musty wool, as long as he didn’t try to move. The torch had gone out, and it was utterly, completely dark, but it didn’t bother him.
He felt strangely, completely calm, like the time he had gone to Port Ravenaught with Durville, years ago. They had visited an ancient temple of the Namarja, and the priests had let them inhale the acrid, intoxicating smoke from a sacred plant they used in their rituals. They had stayed in the gardens for hours, looking up at the clouds as they drifted by, sharing rude jokes and pointless stories, and sipping at honeyed wine. There had been little in the way of religious epiphany for either of them, but it had been a great deal of fun.
There was no sharp scent of smoke in the blackness in front of him. There was no scent of anything at all. The air wasn’t moving, and though he couldn’t stand up to investigate, his more nebulous senses told him that he was somewhere enclosed.
A prison, then. He always seemed to end up in prison when Faidal was involved. And if Faidal was in league with the Siheldi, then he was in impossible trouble.
There were too many questions for him to easily order in his weary, half-shuttered brain. What did the Siheldi want with him? Why had they kept him alive? Where had Bartolo gotten to? And more importantly, where was Megrithe?
“The eallawif,” he whispered, the tiny action of his throat prompting a coughing fit that lasted for terrible, uncountable minutes as his shredded flesh squealed in protest.
“Oh, bloody hell,” he gasped as his breath slowly returned. The words wilted into the thick air as soon as they came out of his mouth, and for a long time there was no other sound than the hiss of breath in and out, in and out of his nostrils as he tried to quiet himself.
Megrithe was safe, somewhere, if the eallawif had honored her agreement. But that bastard Bartolo had probably run to ground. Tiaraku would be sheltering him, and he might never be found. The neneckt were too clever, their allies were too powerful, and their secrets ran far beyond the understanding of their human neighbors.
Faidal had even been talking to a Siheldi. No one had ever heard of such a thing – no one even knew if they had voices – but then again, Arran didn’t think many people had ever had much interest in striking up a conversation.
He had been told that there were wild prophets of the outland fells who claimed to be able to understand the demons, predict their strikes, and even turn them away without the use of red iron, but he wasn’t sure he believed the tall tales. Perhaps he should start. He had been surrounded by madness for so long that anything could be
true.
He would have to learn to get along without red iron from now on, in any case, since Bartolo had destroyed his pendant. “Spiteful little sod,” he muttered, gently flexing his fingers to try to work the cold out of them. His feet felt numb and each breath was a battle he wasn’t sure he could win. He was so thirsty.
“Is anyone there?” he called.
He waited for a while, but there was no response. Eventually, he disentangled one of his arms from the blankets and reached out to see if Faidal had left a cup or a pitcher nearby. He was happy to encounter a tin canteen with his questing hand, but his stiff fingers knocked the container on its side. The cap had been left open for his convenience, but it was now letting the liquid spill onto the stones.
The only small consolation was that he was able to stop himself from reflexively trying to right the bottle, which would have been disastrous. He would rather be a bit parched than tear himself open and bleed his veins dry by accident, alone in the dark.
The jolt of surprise that shook him when he heard the grinding of stone on stone from above nearly accomplished that fate for him, however, and he grasped at his chest, moaning, until a speck of light hovering on the rim of the round pit distracted him.
“Faidal?”
The neneckt is gone, said a voice that was blank, toneless, and frighteningly familiar.
“What did you do with him? Her. I don’t know. What happened?”
She has seen your death, the voice said, and she thinks she can stop it.
Arran swallowed hard. “Can she?”
No.
“Then why did you bother letting her go?”
By the ancient pacts of our brethren, we have no right to keep her. But neither do we have an obligation to let her back in.
“Why are you keeping me, then? You were going to kill me before the eallawif came. Why won’t you finish the job?”
Your life is more valuable than your death, the Siheldi said. That balance may change if you do not do as you are told.
Arran couldn’t help laughing a little. “That isn’t much of a threat. How could you think I value my life after doing this to myself? I will finish the job if I have to. I will not help you kill more innocents.”
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