by S. W. Clarke
The Mages’ Council building sat highest of them all, dome-topped, the sight of it cinching my gut. Eva, I said into the fae’s head, Is everyone in position?
Yes, came the reply a few seconds later. We’re ready.
Good. I paused. I need you to take over for me.
WHAT?
I didn’t answer. Before I could allow my gut to squeeze me into submission, I started toward the Mages’ Council building, Loki trotting at my side.
I hoped Eva would forgive me for this.
Chapter Nineteen
We threaded our way past humans and mages and tourists, the crowds thickening on the sidewalks as we got closer. This was supposed to help our mission: all the people, all those bodies were supposed to be our buffers against the formalists’ eyes.
Right now, they just made staying unnoticed hellishly difficult.
At one point I bumped into a young blond man, who looked right through me, his eyes narrowing on an innocent person behind me. “Mind yourself,” he called, and I slipped past him, moving onto the street.
By now, Liara and the twins would be inside, presenting their papers, asking for the release of the prisoners. Twenty minutes had shrunk to fifteen.
Loki kept by my feet, a shadow. He knew if he moved too far away, the magic wouldn’t follow him. Unlike Umbra, the power of my enchantments still limited them to a small radius of about six feet.
Together, we waited as a car passed, then dashed across the road into the cool caress of the dome’s shadow.
Clem? Eva’s voice said into my head. What’s going on?
Just got stuck in the crowd, I said. Nothing’s changed, but I need you to take the lead.
Got it.
It almost hurt how much she trusted me.
Loki and I came to the edge of the building, passed down an ancient, narrow staircase alongside it, the shadows and coolness deepening. At the base of the stairs, I found it: the Via Pizza restaurant. The sun and sky were only a small strip above us, casting a slender light.
I turned away from the restaurant, facing what would be a bare wall if I didn’t have the ability to see. But because I did, I immediately saw a door. Tall and iron and furnished with an iron handle and a large placard overtop it that read, in bold lettering, Prison.
Eva, who’d shown me how to see, would have been so proud of me.
I did as Liara had done: knocked three times on the door, the sound of bone on iron ringing through the air. After a few seconds, it opened, and a seven-foot suit of armor stood in the doorway.
“Business?” an echoing voice said from inside the armor.
The helmet was fully shut, no face visible beneath. At its hip, a sword almost as long as me gleamed in the daylight. The armor looked so lifelike, so animate, that I stood there for a second, not believing that a person wasn’t inside it.
I waited, my breath held. Waiting to be seen and seized or unseen and ignored.
Seeing nothing before it, the helmet shifted left, then right. With mechanical precision, it turned away from the door, allowing it to shut.
This was it.
I slipped through the narrowing opening, Loki brushing past my ankles as he moved with me, and as the door closed with a loud echo, I caught a glimpse of a stairway down before perfect darkness enveloped us.
Right, because suits of armor don’t need light.
Loki and I huddled in the corner of the entry, against the cold stone, not six inches from the suit of armor. We were so close I could practically feel the chill off the metal.
A moment later, the armor scraped across the stone, clanking as it moved to stand in the far corner of the entry. Always guarding this spot. Always.
I raised my hand, lit a flame on my fingertips. It extended only three feet, allowing me to see within my enshroudment. That was enough, at least, to spot the top of the staircase.
“Loki,” I said. “You good?”
“Do you want pleasantries and tea, or do you want to find Callum?”
“Glad to know you’re as much a jerk as ever.”
“Back at you.”
Together we started down the curving stairs. I had to move slow with my limited sight, taking each step with exact precision. The stone was smooth, the edges of the steps worn with centuries of use.
Slipping would be easy, and falling down the whole staircase would be easier.
We curved down and around, arriving at a landing, where ambient light from an overhead lantern met us, along with a low-ceilinged rectangular room, ten iron-barred cells along the two opposing walls. Between the bars, the air shimmered with different colors of magic.
The place smelled of urine, shit, and dampness. The walls were carved from massive old stones, darkened with age.
We’d arrived on the first floor of the mages’ prison.
Liara, Elijah, and Isaiah stood in front of a far cell, flanked by a group of four shackled prisoners they’d already freed. She was conferring with one of the suits of armor, pointing to a sheet of paper and nodding at the cell. “This one,” she said, and the armor turned to the cell, inserted a key, and the shimmering magic disappeared.
The armor opened the cell door and disappeared inside to retrieve the fae. This was the fifth prisoner, which left seven more to go.
Time was running short. I needed to find the way down to the second floor.
Two more suits of armor patrolled the space, circling it at even intervals with their impossibly long swords sheathed at their sides. One was passing close to us right now, and the other was at the opposite side of the room.
“Keep close,” I said to Loki, and started across the center of the room just after the suit of armor had passed. Across the way, an open doorway beckoned—the only other way out of this room.
We had to stop hard as one of the suits of armor passed in front of us, and then continued forward, arriving at the doorway and finding another winding staircase down.
Like the first, this one didn’t have light.
“And this one,” Liara was saying as Loki and I started down it, my flame guiding my feet.
The stairs curved around twice, brought me to a deeper, damper level of the prison. Here too I encountered only terrifying darkness, and worse, I could hear two suits of armor clanking their way around the room.
“It’s identical to the room above,” Loki said. “Ten cells, five on each side.”
When I knelt and set my fingers to Loki’s fur, a new sheen of flame rippled over him. An enshroudment just for him—a thing I could only share with my familiar, with whom I had a magical bond.
“You check the right side,” I said, the flame in my hand my only light. “I’ll check the left. Be quick.”
“Quicker than you,” he murmured as he darted off to the right, disappearing into blackness.
I rose, listening. Neither of the animated suits were nearby, so I started toward the left side of cells. In the first cell, iridescent green magic flowed between the bars. Off the shadows of my flame, I could barely make out a woman on a cot, her face half-hidden by her brown hair.
I moved on, a shard of my own callousness piercing me even as I kept walking.
Time was too short to feel bad now.
In the second cell red-orange magic flowed, and an old man sat slumped on his cot, beard almost to his knees.
Halfway down the block, I had to press myself up against the stone divider between two cells as one of the suits of armor passed by, a good two feet taller than me.
Forever. That was how long they would animate this place, guard these people: forever.
When it had passed, I carried on, taking a second’s glance at cells three, four, and five. None of them held a prisoner I knew.
When I arrived at the far side of the room, where another set of dark steps beckoned me down, Loki was already there, waiting for me, appearing in the cone of my flame with a flicking tail and green eyes staring up at me.
“Anything?”
His tail flicked again. “No
thing. Down?”
We had maybe five minutes. Five minutes before the door would open to allow Liara and the fae and the prisoners out—my only opportunity to leave. If I missed it, I didn’t know how long we’d be in this place.
Maybe always. Maybe we’d never get out.
But I couldn’t take the chance, couldn’t skip the third floor. I’d live with it gnawing at me: What was on that last floor? Could he have been there?
No—I’d rather die here than not know.
“Down,” I said.
The third floor of the prison was the final floor, the dampest, the one most remote from any sense of a sky or a world beyond this one. Loki said it was identical to the first two floors.
Down here, ten desolate cells promised solitude. The endless clanking of armor. Insanity.
Loki and I split up, passing down opposite sides of the room. I passed the first and second cells, and it was when I arrived at the third—with red-orange magic dancing between the bars—that an old, old woman bolted up to a seat on her cot, hair half-wild around her face, and stared at me.
“I see you,” she whispered. “I see you. I see you, red-haired girl.”
She did. Somehow, she saw me.
I took a step back, one finger rising to my lips even as the two suits of armor stopped. It was a sudden absence of noise, and when I spun, one of them stood ten feet away from me, the other on the opposite side not far from Loki.
I took a step away, then another, keeping my eyes on the suit of armor nearest me like it was a bobcat who’d pounce me if it saw my back.
Instead, the armor approached the old woman’s cell. As if engaging some speaking mechanism, it went stiff, the head shifted a degree, and a deep voice—the same one I’d heard from the armor who guarded the prison’s entrance—said to her, “What do you see?”
She rocked, eyes shifting to me, then over to Loki. Her eyebrows rose a degree, settled lower as though she’d made a decision. Then, with a stabbing finger, she pointed toward the magical lantern in the center of the ceiling. “I see you. I see you.” And with her movement, the lantern came to life, illuminating the space. Her voice went hoarse, then broke into laughter.
The suit of armor remained still. The helmet shifted another degree, and then it resumed its pacing. As did the other across the room.
My chest released, breath leaving me. I stepped out of the armor’s way, found myself hesitating in front of the old woman’s cell. That woman deserved to be free. She deserved—
The old woman shook her head at me. There’s no way, she mouthed, flicking her fingers off toward the stairs. Go. Her head jerked when I didn’t move, and she grew irritated, eyebrows drawing together. Go, go.
I went, finding myself in front of the fourth cell. Not this one, either.
The fifth cell was empty.
When I turned to Loki, he’d already crossed toward the stairs. Waiting for me. Which must mean he hadn’t found who we were looking for.
I came to him, and I knew pleading must be written on my face, because he said, “We have to go. Now.”
No Callum Rathmore.
There was no Callum Rathmore in this prison.
So where the hell was he?
Wild anger filled me even as we started up the stairs. I needed to free these people from this prison. If not today, then someday. My hands went out to the slick stone walls as we ascended and I tried not to slip, but failed a few times. My knee banged stone once, pain surging in me, but I ignored it.
Umbra had told me Callum would be imprisoned. If he wasn’t in the mages’ prison, where was he?
I felt deceived. Lied to.
“Hurry. Hurry!” Loki’s tail disappeared around the final corner of the steps as we came to the second floor.
Liara’s voice echoed faintly above. “Thank you. We will…”
The rest of it was lost to the clanging as we arrived at the second floor. The two of us ran through the center of the room, trusting fully in the magic protecting us.
We arrived at the stairs, and Loki told me in a breathless rush the rest of what Liara had said. “They’re leaving. They’re leaving now.”
Chapter Twenty
We took the stairs to the second floor at a reckless leap, Loki bounding and me climbing them two at a time. My heart had enlarged to fill my body, became the current of my rushing blood, the adrenaline coursing through me.
This was fight or flight or both. It was both, because I never felt adrenaline without the urge to fight.
And right now, I was piping hot with anger, anyway. No Callum. No goddamn Callum.
Keep your head, Rational Clem thought. Keep your head or lose the enshroudment.
She—I—was right. The magic had begun to tingle over my skin, which always preceded losing it. I was getting too hot. Too emotional.
You can punch walls later. You can save him later.
An enforced coolness spread across me. Later—I could save him later.
I knew as we reached the second floor and sprinted across it, cat followed by witch, that I had fully committed myself to finding him. Freeing him. If he wasn’t here, then I would look elsewhere. If he wasn’t elsewhere, I would look everywhere.
I would burn this world down before I let his own father keep him imprisoned. No—no chains or shackles for him. Not after the power he had brought out of me. Not after he’d swung that sword for me on the tundra and sent me away with the possibility of seeing my sister’s face again.
Captivity was unacceptable.
Which meant my captivity was unacceptable. I wouldn’t—couldn’t—be stuck here.
Loki and I hit the staircase to the first floor with almost feral intensity, and my hands sometimes touched the damp steps, my boots sliding as I climbed. Up we went, rounding the steps toward freedom and the blue sky, and as we emerged onto the first floor, I found it empty except for the two patrolling suits of armor.
“They’re already up the stairs,” Loki said, not stopping, not looking back, a black flash across the stones. He wanted out as much as me.
I followed, still sprinting. When I slipped on the stone and my hands went out, fresh pain spiked up my arms and in my knees.
Loki stopped on a dime, spun toward me. Waiting.
I pressed him on, scrabbling up. “Keep going.”
We came to the final stairs, crossing into darkness except for my flame, trusting that we would find what we were looking for when we came around the bend and up to the final threshold.
And we did. Sort of.
The big iron door was open, shadows moving as the last of the prisoners passed into the sunlight. The suit of armor stood guard, holding the door open.
No, not holding it open.
Allowing it to shut. Closing it. Closing off the daylight.
As one, Loki and I ran. He rushed a foot ahead of me, and I followed with a heart ready to burst.
It didn’t matter. I’d rather it burst than never see the sun again.
The space narrowed, narrowed, until I had to turn my body sideways to slide through. My right hand had to slide behind my back to avoid my fingers being clipped by the door shutting.
It was that close. That close to never leaving.
But we were out, Liara and the twins leading their group of prisoners past the pizza place, down the alley, along the alternate—less traveled—alley we had planned to escape by. Elijah and Isaiah were already passing out cloaks to the prisoners to hide their shackles and ragged appearances.
We’re out, Liara’s voice said into my head. Everyone to the river.
The river, where we would part the veil and leave.
The others weren’t supposed to get too close. They were to keep watch from a distance as we all converged on the river. Liara, the twins, and the prisoners would pass through first. Then the rest of us.
I doubled over for a second, Loki’s fur brushing my leg as we two stood outside the prison. We did it. We did it.
We hadn’t found him, but we hadn’
t died in the process, either.
We could keep looking.
Footsteps sounded at the mouth of the alley. When I glanced up, Mishka and Akelan were making their way down toward us.
Where are the others? I said into Mishka’s head. Eva, Keene, Paxton, Maise…
Coming, came Mishka’s reply, her eyes drifting out over the alley as though she was trying to find me.
Any trouble? I asked her.
The formalist police are everywhere, but they seemed mostly preoccupied with the tourists.
Good. There was a substantial shot of getting away with this.
Loki and I followed the prisoners—of whom there were only six. Apparently Liara hadn’t been able to get everyone.
Six was better than none.
I’m with you, I said into Liara’s head. Just behind you.
Stay sharp, she shot back.
What else would I—could I—be in this place? But I swallowed my own snipe; we were leaders. These people’s freedom and lives depended on us being leaders.
We continued down alleys, the sky mostly shielded from our view as we passed down the old, narrow streets toward Dean Village. Soon the Dean Bridge came into view, and far beneath it, perpendicular old cobblestone paths winding their way alongside the water, houses and buildings peppering the two sides.
The river was so integrated, it was as though it had been built into the city. As though the city had allowed it to flow through.
And down here, away from the Royal Mile, quiet reigned. As Umbra and Milonakis had predicted, no tourists strayed this way in October.
We came to the bridge, and Liara led the cloaked prisoners down a steep staircase toward the Leith river. Loki and I followed, still enshrouded.
This group was conspicuous, came the thought. But we were close. Too close to fail now, after everything. We were practically on the water.
Except, as we came down to the cobblestone path and into the shade of a tall old building, the river lapping next to us, a car stopped on the road overhead. Footsteps, sharp and loud, sounded on the stairs. Two formalist officers with their nightsticks already out.
“Ma’am,” one of them called. “Ma’am, stop.”