But what would the Guild do about a few vats of red dye if Tiaraku had the Siheldi in his pocket? It wasn’t important at all, and she found herself getting ever so slightly irritated at Jairus for believing it still mattered.
“I will when this is finished,” she said. “I just need to concentrate.”
“I understand. I’ve just been hoping – well, maybe the tests won’t matter so much if I came back with something like that.”
Megrithe smiled a little. “It’s my discovery, you know. What makes you think I’ll share the glory with the likes of you?”
“Nothing. I suppose I didn’t really do anything for you yet. But I hope to,” he said seriously. “We didn’t get off to the best start, but I’ve made my decision to help you will whatever you need. I don’t have a choice anymore, now that I’ve defied the Warden. And if we make it to this mountain and find your friend, you won’t have a choice but to vouch for me with the Guild Master,” he said, teasing a little, but she furrowed her brow. “Or not,” he added lightly.
“No, of course I would. It’s just…”
“I wasn’t ever really going to hurt you,” he said carefully. “I wasn’t.”
“I believe you. I’m just – I’m not an inspector either,” she blurted out, feeling her head start to spin even more severely as her shame and disappointment welled up into her eyes.
“You aren’t?”
She shook her head. “I was, but I resigned before I came back here. I had to. The Guild Master was not very pleased.”
“You resigned before you told him about the counterfeit?” Jairus asked, a little shocked that she would ever give up such an incredible opportunity.
“It didn’t come up.”
Jairus just stared at her – turned his face towards her, at least, and would have been staring had he been able to. Even though he couldn’t see her, she still ducked her head and didn’t look up again for quite a while.
She knew the single-minded intensity it took to pursue an inspector’s position. She had lived that life herself for so long that she had thought there wasn’t any other way to be. It was all she had ever wanted.
Jairus was still pursuing that dream, even in spite of his difficulties. How could she ever make him comprehend that there was something more important? He would think she had lost her mind, just like she had thought the drop-outs and failures of her own schooling days were pitiful, lazy, unworthy creatures.
To resign from the Guild willingly, without any pressing evidence of wrongdoing, was nearly unheard of. She had not found religion and fled to a convent, nor had she fallen pregnant out of wedlock or decided to give up her career in favor of that blessed union with a man who could support and satisfy her.
The real reason – the eallawif’s bargain for her life – felt too private to share with him. It still hurt, and she didn’t want to tell someone who couldn’t understand the wounds that had led her to accept her unenviable fate. Arran would understand, she thought. But that was different. He had fought the Siheldi, too. He was different, and he wasn’t there.
“I just needed to be free to come back here,” she said when he didn’t see fit to break the silence. “I didn’t want to be bound by the Guild’s rules.”
“That makes perfect sense,” he told her, although she could tell that he didn’t really think so. “But –”
“Nikko, I think we can go,” she called instead of letting him finish. She stood up far too quickly, gasping a little as her sense of balance deserted her before recovering well enough to launch herself forward towards the door.
The harbor front smelled like algae and bird droppings. The tide was at its lowest, revealing the greenish-brown scum that clung to the wooden structures under the waterline, peppered with barnacles and tight-lipped mussels that huddled in the safety of their dark shells.
It was not a pleasant place to be for someone suffering the lingering effects of a dose of ychauyad, and even though Nikko seemed to find a great deal of amusement in the plight of his human charges, he didn’t do anything that would cause them to linger in the stomach-churning air.
Instead, he hurried them away from the sloping bowl of earth that held the commercial docks and most of the city, taking them uphill along a wandering street that ended abruptly at the edge of the island’s sheer cliffs with nothing but a rusted iron rail to stop a cart or incautious pedestrian from plummeting down into the water.
“Up and over,” Nikko said as Megrithe hung back from the disturbing sight of the deadly, crashing waves below them. There were sharp boulders in the shallow surf, crumbled off the rock faces during storms or shakings of the earth, and if Nikko meant for her to jump from such a height, he would be seriously disappointed.
“There are stairs,” he told her. “Look.”
Leofric held onto her arm as she cautiously peered over the railing, seeing to her great relief that the stone actually extended into a comfortable shelf only a foot or so below the fencing. The landing led towards a set of steps, wide and shallowly twisting through a deep channel cut into the edifice, a sturdy rope acting as a handhold and a barrier on the outside edge between safety and the sea.
“That isn’t so bad,” she said, trying to smile. The steps were large enough for two to walk abreast, if they were brave enough, and they seemed sufficiently sheltered from the worst of the wind. “Can someone else go first, though?”
Nikko did the honors, disappearing from sight almost immediately as Leofric carefully handed Megrithe over the railing. Heights had never been a strong point for her, and it took a great deal of concentration not to start trembling as her dizziness intensified. She immediately moved towards the inside of the stairs, one hand against the solid stone as the breeze, now unimpeded by buildings or trees, whipped through her hair and caught at her skirt, threatening to carry her away.
Jairus followed, seeming as surefooted as Nikko, but Megrithe decided to keep her attention focused on carefully placing one foot in front of the other, winding downwards and downwards towards the growing rumble of the ocean and the crash of spray that gently shivered the island, slowly wearing down the land’s resistance to the water’s inevitable embrace.
There was a little inlet at the bottom of the staircase where the ocean poked a calm and clear finger into the island’s side. Around the open grotto was a pebbly beach, just big enough for the four travelers to stand on as they gazed upwards at the heights they had just traversed.
“What does it say?” Megrithe asked, staring at a line of enormous letters in the neneckt tongue carved into a smoothed-over portion of the cliff, plain to see from the ocean but invisible from land.
“It’s an old proverb,” Nikko told her. “Roughly speaking it says, ‘He who keeps his love to the sea need not discover the unworth of men.’”
“Oh,” Megrithe said after thinking about it for a while. “That’s not a very nice thing to put plain on a mountain, is it?”
“The old ways did not so much encourage friendship with humans,” Nikko said. “Three hundred years ago, a neneckt would never have dreamt of leaving Niheba for any reason. And a good rule it was, too. Humans cannot be trusted. A right bunch of bastards to the very last.”
Leofric cuffed him lightly on the shoulder, producing Nikko’s first real smile since meeting with Bartolo. “Can we get this over with?” he asked, and Nikko nodded.
“Make sure you’re all holding tight,” he said, giving Megrithe one of his hands and Leofric the other. “Just take hers,” he said to Jairus, and Megrithe tentatively offered him her fingers.
The water was cold as they waded in, but it wasn’t overly unpleasant. It took a bit of effort to convince herself to duck her head under – and even more to make herself try to breathe when she could hold it in no longer – but the strain was all in her own mind.
The water floated around her without truly touching her, as if she had simply wrapped herself in a cloak on a wet and rainy day, no bubbles rising from her nose or mouth and no stinging
salt preventing her from keeping her eyes open. It was simultaneously delightfully odd and profoundly unnerving. She tried to keep her gaze anchored upon the steady, unyielding horizon as Nikko guided them down the steep shelf of the ocean floor into deeper water.
Once she got used to the sensation of rushing headlong through the water with nothing more than Nikko’s grip to keep her from floating away, the journey was relatively monotonous. The flat, gray stone and drifts of buff sand produced little to attract her attention, the surprising sameness broken only by the occasional flash of a silvery fish darting into a hiding place.
Nikko was not bringing them towards Emyer-Ekvori, where they would be instantly spotted and stopped. He was taking them instead along a wide arc that skirted the city, its outlying villages, and its tall, green fields of edible kelp that helped feed the underwater populace. They had started early in the morning, but the circuitous route would take much of the day to complete, which gave her plenty of time to think about what was awaiting her at their destination. None of the thoughts were anything remotely cheerful.
Not even the notion of finding Arran alive at the other end of the journey could do much to lift her spirits. She started to wonder if she even really believed there was a chance to succeed.
What if Durville had been right to say that Arran couldn’t have survived what he had done to himself? It would all be for nothing, and she would simply be hurtling headlong into her own death. The Queen would be there. The Siheldi would surround them, and she would die screaming. She would be leading her friends to their end, and the world would burn into darkness and dust because she had not been quick enough or keen enough or strong enough to stop it.
“It will be fine, you know,” Jairus said quietly, shifting his fingers in her too-tight grasp. She tried not to pinch as much as she smiled weakly and kept her eyes forward without answering him. She was aware that he meant well, but she had had enough of people who acted like they knew the future. They didn’t, and she had never liked the lie of pointless platitudes, no matter how well intentioned.
Eventually, the mountain rose into view over the willowy curves of the dunes. Megrithe didn’t know when her heart had started kicking so furiously against the walls of her chest, but she felt her breath shorten in response as a knot grew in her middle. She squeezed her eyes shut and refused to look at the craggy peak, cloaked in ash and misery, hung with a wreath of shimmering, steaming water that roiled black and sooty around the shoulders of the grumbling giant.
You know what I want with you, the Queen had said, and moments later there had been nothing but Megrithe’s hollow screams. Arran had shouted – he had tried, but there was no way to stop it, and Megrithe grew as cold as ice as she thought back to the all-consuming terror, the unbearable, unbreakable dread of dead fingers and a flicking tongue, of feeling the Siheldi supping on her soul like a bowl of cold soup, gorging itself on the haggard remnants of her desperation to live.
She felt a little despondent mew escaping her clenched lips as she opened her eyes again and the mountain filled her vision, tall and serene and brimming with death. She wanted to let go of Nikko’s hand and float away – she almost hoped that she would plummet straight down to shatter on the rugged slopes. She almost felt like she would splinter apart anyway.
But as soon as Nikko set them down carefully on a relatively flat prominence close to the mountain’s head, the fear abruptly converted itself into anger. She would not let terror get the best of her. She would not.
The Guild had never bowed to shadows before – it was the Guild’s sole purpose to keep them at bay – and whether or not she still held an inspector’s badge, she had been trained to the highest abilities of her kind. She had faced the Queen and survived it, and she would not bend her knee to powerless memories and empty shades of faded trepidation.
“Megrithe?” Jairus asked carefully, placing a hand on her shoulder as she stood there as rigidly as an iron post, and she sagged under his touch like a deflating pudding taken out of the oven too soon.
“Don’t make me go,” she wailed, too late to bite her tongue, the fingers she clasped over her mouth unable to shovel the words back inside. She despised herself instantly.
He tried to put his arm around her in a gesture of friendly comfort, but she shrugged him off, crumpling in on herself, squatting down with her head on her knees when she realized there was no room to run.
“Leave me alone,” she sobbed into her skirt, helplessly mortified and even angrier now than she had been before.
The three of them just stood there, watching her silently, bewildered and confused. They had not been there. How could they know? Only Arran had seen her – she hated that he had seen her in her worst moment, but the truth was that he had. That strange, fleeting connection was the only thing that had kept driving her towards a truth she wasn’t sure she wanted to uncover, and now they were probably standing on top of his grave.
At that moment, she wanted to go home more than she wanted to bring Arran home – more than she wanted to stop the brewing chaos that she didn’t understand and couldn’t control; the actions of kings and sorcerers and the terrors of the night that had reigned supremely for centuries despite the best intentions of men far braver than she would ever be.
She fumbled in her pocket for a handkerchief she didn’t have, which brought her back to her morose visit with Elspeth Swinn.
If there was a grave to be found, or a body in need of one, Arran’s mother deserved to know about it. She deserved the truth, and Megrithe had as good as promised that she would find it for her.
She couldn’t save the world, maybe, or even save her own soul from what was waiting for her, but she could try, at least, to soothe the grief of one poor widow waiting for news of a son lost to the seas.
“I’m sorry,” she said a moment later, standing up again in one swift motion, pulling her tears back inside her like she had done after each of a thousand nights of hidden, despairing sorrow after her father had died. This was no different. She would make it no different. They would not see her cry again. Not Jairus, not Arran, not the eallawif – not anyone. “We can go.”
In any other circumstance, she might have strode away to hide her face from her companions, but on the bare outcropping of rock, there wasn’t anywhere to stride. She just had to wait patiently, keeping her eyes down and her shoulders squared, as Nikko ducked around the edge of the platform, one foot on the lip of rock and the other searching for something on the other side, the solid shape he had managed to maintain while underwater shimmering and fading for a moment as his concentration shifted elsewhere.
But when he vanished entirely, it wasn’t because he had let his physical form dissipate. He had wiggled his way past a jutting boulder and into what must be an entrance to the mountain’s labyrinth. Leofric beckoned Megrithe to take her turn, and she glanced uneasily back at Jairus.
“I’ll help him if he needs it,” Leofric said in her ear. She touched her hidden medallion of red iron, just to make sure it was still there, before turning her attention to placing her foot in a crumbled pocket in the stone, crossing the other leg over as soon as she saw the mouth of a tunnel.
There was nothing to hold onto as the rock bulged outwards, hundreds of feet above the sea floor. She drew a deep breath as she remembered Arran plummeting to the ground when Faidal pushed him off the wall of their prison cell, the water providing no cushion for his painful fall.
“Steady,” Leofric said, gripping the fabric at the shoulder of her dress to hold her in case she couldn’t make it around.
The part of her that was still enraged at herself resented the notion that he thought she needed help, but the sensible piece of her mind was more than a little relieved when a shower of scree slipped from under her heel and she froze in mid-motion, hugging the boulder with wobbling tears at the corners of her eyes as she remembered throwing her arms around the wide bulk of her father’s barrel-like chest, unable to make her half-grown arms clasp together on
the other side.
She pushed the memory aside. Why were her thoughts drifting so far away? She had not let such things touch her for many years, but now she felt unable to flee from the pictures of her younger life, before the pain of loss, before ambition – before anything bad had ever happened to her.
“I’m fine,” she called back around the corner when she made it to the other side, realizing immediately why Nikko hadn’t just brought them there to begin with. The tunnel had an overbite, where the floor had tumbled away, and the smooth bubbles of dried magma that were left pouring out of the tube, frozen in time, were too steeply slick to stand on without Nikko’s steady support from somewhere above as she scrambled, bent over like the twisted dough of a summer festival bun, into a mouth narrow enough to admit only one body at a time.
Thankfully, the tunnel opened wider just past its beginning, and she was able to stand up straight with her back pressed against the sloping wall, feeling like she had skipped into the maw of a beast that would crunch her bones for its tea.
As she stood there in the dark, waiting, she felt a sharp, aching alarm burrow its way below her fear, below her uncertainty, and underneath the thin film of madness she suspected was lurking somewhere within her, too. The place she was standing was all wrong. She touched her pocket again, taking comfort in the hard, flat metal under the skin of cloth. Red iron was never wrong. It was the only constant in the world: the only thing as clear and comforting and true as the knowledge of a warm bed waiting at home at the end of a long journey.
But she had no home to go back to. She had traded it for the chance to do exactly what she was doing. It would all have been pointless if she turned back now.
“All right?” Leofric asked as he slipped around the bend to join her.
“Yes,” she replied. “I thought you were going to help Jairus.”
Leofric shrugged. “He didn’t want me to.”
“Stubborn fools, the lot of you,” she said under her breath, but then she shook her head to clear the irritation away. Everyone had their pride. Everyone deserved to.
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