Brea shimmered and glistened before us. Softened by snow, the city had never looked more beautiful. Stone turrets rose to the east. To the west, sunlight sparkled off the steaming dock waters. The breeze carried the smell of burning coal from a nearby forge and the sounds of traders brave enough to venture into the cold.
“It is so like Arach.” Her eyes went to the spire, and it occurred to me that Brea could have once been part of the great city of Arach, making that spire—the oldest structure here—an ancient remnant of her home.
“I used to come up to this spot,” I told her. “Many times in fact. From here, I mapped a path from the dock to the eastside and everywhere in between. There, you see where the slate roofs sag under the snow? Those are merchants stores—great warehouses used for storing shipments prior to being loaded onto ships. Five ridges to the west, where the small spire rises. That was once a children’s home. It’s now the workhouse.” A shiver trickled down my back. “I often came up here to get away.”
“From what?”
“Wrong choices,” I replied, eyeing the workhouse. Even from this far away, its massive, gray stone bulk hunched over an entire block.
Shaianna wrapped her arms around herself and shivered.
“We should go back,” I said. “I just wanted you to see the city from above, while we had time.”
She hugged her arms close. “Not yet.”
“It’s freezing.”
“I don’t want to go back.” She looked again across the city. “The spire—it is at the center of all we see.”
She slipped her hand in mine, closed her warm fingers, and leaned in close. Her shivers slowed, and I felt her body relax against mine. For a few precious moments, we had the world spread before us. Her hair smelled like ginger lily, warm and evocative. I steered my thoughts away before they wandered too far into trouble.
“Thief, I have watched your people, and I do not believe it is customary for a lady to stand so close to a gentleman.”
“Then it is good we are neither.”
A light chuckle shook her shoulders and sent a curious shiver shuddering through me, one that had nothing to do with the cold. This impossible woman was killing me in the slowest possible way.
“Had you not found me in that alley,” I murmured, “I would surely have died. Perhaps not that night, but soon after. Robbed, beaten, left to bleed out in the street. I was playing the odds and deliberately losing. Did you know that when we met?”
“How could I know your thoughts when we were not yet bonded?” she asked, still admiring the city. The breeze had teased a few locks of hair free of the pins. I watched them trail in the air, black against the snow-white Brean rooftops.
“The woman on the moors, Jodelle,” I said. “She told me you would have known my weakness from the moment we met. Did you?”
“That old woman was filled with regrets and bitterness. She lived on the moors with many ghosts. Her words may have meant nothing or everything.”
I brushed my chin against her hair and whispered in her ear, “Did you?”
“No, thief.” But she smiled. I could see the side of her cheek lift. “I saw only a drunken fool. Someone easily persuaded to do my bidding.”
That wasn’t entirely unexpected. When we met, I hadn’t thought much of her either. “And now?”
She shifted, bringing her hands up between us and lifting her face. Her warmth and the feel of her pressed close led my thoughts on a merry chase that headed toward desire. What might it be like to slowly kiss her? Not the rush of a kiss, like the one we had shared in the tomb, but a kiss with meaning?
I started to step back, but she rested her arms over my shoulders, holding me still. “Now I see a man no longer running from a fear he cannot change. Someone who could, one day, stop falling and rise above the rest of his kind. I see a friend, perhaps the only friend I’ve ever known.”
I slowly, deliberately eased my hand around her waist and spread my fingers over the curve of her back. A hint of curiosity sparked in her eyes, and I wished I knew what her riddles meant. “Did you come back to Brea for me?”
“No.”
I steeled my expression but couldn’t guard my heart. I didn’t realize I’d harbored that hope until her denial stole it from me. “Then why?”
“Revenge,” she said.
Her lips touched mine, stealing the shock of the word and replacing it with a surge of hunger. She tasted sweet, of things too good to let go. I forgot her answer and what it meant as I gathered her close. She matched my hunger and drove it higher. The heat in her kiss, in her touch, burned through what doubt I may have had until I could think of nothing else but the feel of her pushed against me, the rush of her kiss, and the tears on her cheeks. She pulled away too soon, and the cold rushed back in.
I thumbed the tears away but could do nothing about the sadness shrouding her. “I wish I knew you.”
A half smile lifted one corner of her lips. “You’re the only one who ever has.”
Chapter Twenty
The hour I was forced to wait for Fallford gnawed at my restlessness. At some point, I started pacing the space in front of his reception room fireplace, debating whether to leave Brea with Shaianna, or leave her behind, or share with Fallford all I knew and somehow reveal the truth about the Inner Circle before it was too late. The clock above Fallford’s fireplace ticked in time with every step I took. Six months ago, the answer would have been easy: board a ship and leave this wretched land and my responsibilities with it. But I couldn’t turn my back on this. I couldn’t live with myself, knowing I could have somehow changed things. If the mages got free, people would die. Normal, everyday folks who weren’t prepared for mages and magic. I would have been one of those people if not for Shaianna.
The rooftop kiss had scored itself into my memory and tangled my thoughts in a web of hope and doubt. Hope that maybe I didn’t have to be alone, and doubt that she wasn’t for the likes of me.
I couldn’t go anywhere, or do anything, until I’d exposed the truth of the Inner Circle. To do that, I needed facts and evidence. I needed allies.
I’d left Shaianna with Agatha at the coach house, promising to return before dusk. I had a choice to make: stay or go. Do right by the Brean people who had no idea what waited in the center of their city, or live another day in another city, somewhere far from responsibility. Was this my wrong choice the moorswoman had spoken of?
On Fallford’s return, he greeted me with his usual subdued smile and eager handshake, and then commented on how I looked as though I had aged months in the days since we last met. I laughed and told him it was more like years.
“I have some answers for you, Mister Vance. Come, allow me to show you.” He ushered me into his study, to a table where a parchment had been arranged alongside others just like it. “I made some inquiries and was able to borrow some of these antiquities from private collections. I looked again at the images, using the story you’d told me to search for reoccurring events or phrases. Goodness, what I found …” He pulled on silk gloves and spread the parchments across the table. “As is clear, there was a battle between an invading force and the existing people of these lands, those who lived in the great city of Arach. Just one battle. No war to speak of. It was over in days. The casualties were too great, rendering a war superfluous, but I am getting ahead of myself. Sit, man.”
I didn’t sit, but leaned closer and examined the artwork. “Tell me.”
“They came by sea.” He pointed at one scene on a new piece of parchment. It depicted a string of rowboats landing on a beach and tall ships on the horizon. “Translations suggest from a lowland country, probably Lanskewly, a three-month sea voyage, but that’s by the by. They came seeking treasure and resources and found a city so vast it”—Fallford trailed his gloved finger across the parchment to a faded line of writing—“swallowed the highest hills to the farthest lands.” He looked up at me. “Arach.” Then he continued with a quickness that had my heart racing. “The people
welcomed them, with the understanding that nothing would be taken from the city. Riches, knowledge—nothing was to leave Arach. Of course the newcomers eventually stole something, though my colleagues and I cannot decipher what. Either way, the Arachians summoned a formidable force. Magic flooded the city and brought with it the Wrath of the Earth. It is given substantial emphasis in these texts, so we can assume it’s an it and not a generalization. The queen controlled this great power with the Eye of Arach. The Dragon’s Eye, Vance.”
“What happened?” I suspected I already knew, but I let him go on.
“It says an ocean of fire drowned the land and left behind shadow and dust.” He straightened. “This fire destroyed everything.”
“Not everything.” I swallowed. “Shadow and Dust. It’s literal. It’s a name. A person.”
“What makes you say that?”
“I’ve spent the last few months trying to survive her.” And perhaps nurturing feelings that were, even now, making me second-guess myself.
“Ah, the woman you spoke of? The sorceress.”
Sorceress. Assassin. Friend. Enemy. And more, so much more.
I nodded. Shadow and Dust, the same term that followed her everywhere. It couldn’t be a coincidence. “She’s the sole survivor of a battle that killed hundreds?”
“Thousands died. On both sides. The queen controlled the Eye and laid waste to everything. But some survived. I’ll get to that …” Fallford pulled off his gloves. “Like any collector, I enjoy a tale or two, but this is unsettling. Where is the Eye, Vance?”
“Destroyed.” Fallford’s expression brightened, but mine obviously didn’t, because his relief was short-lived. “She crushed it. I don’t know why. If anything, these tales suggest she should want to keep the Eye. She told me there was the potential to use it to make a better time.”
“And she destroyed it?”
“Right in front of me. She said, ‘It begins.’ Do you know what that means?”
“I fear I do have some further knowledge regarding your companion. Come.” We moved from his study to his upstairs library packed floor to ceiling with shelves of books. Again, already laid out on the table, was a selection of journals, scribed in languages I didn’t have a hope of deciphering.
“There was one tale,” Fallford continued. “A colleague remembered it from his travels and loaned me this tome. It tells of the battle and how the land burned, but in the rubble a cup was found, entirely untouched by fire. It shouldn’t have survived the inferno, so few would touch the item, believing it to be cursed. They dug around it and buried it, along with their dead, and left this land. But that’s not the end of it. They later learned that the survivors were poisoned by the magic. Those infected heard whispers telling them how to harvest magic from the earth, or more precisely, from gems. They tried to use their new talent to build a city like Arach, but the more magic they used, the more it distorted them, until there was nothing left but hunger. Those poisoned were loaded onto what they called plague ships and sent back here, to Brea. The city was little more than a dockside then. I suppose they thought their infected would die here.”
They hadn’t died. They’d lived and built the Inner Circle and the grand spire. Hundreds of years and generations later, they still lived inside their walls, hiding their secret inside the spire. “And the curse of the cup? Does it say more in your books?”
“Yes. It claims the cup contained life and death.” He shook his head. “There cannot be life without death. The cup is a curse. Any who drink from it will be tethered to the earth. A life for life. You told me, Vance, you drank from the cup?”
“I did. And I’m still here.” But my smile barely covered my worry. She had bound me to her. Marked me. I felt her pain like it was my own. We were tied at some level I didn’t understand. “Just stories,” I dismissed, but didn’t believe my words. I wasn’t yet ready to reveal how close Shaianna and I had become. “Was there any mention of a Forgotten One? Or the Shadow?”
“Ah, yes. The Shadow and Dust …” Fallford rummaged through a stack of books. He pulled several free and flicked them open. “The Shadow was another name for the queen’s vengeance. It appears often in these Lanskewly tales. Some tales say the queen summoned the Forgotten One to aid in her battle. That this force rushed the opposing forces: a Shadow which consumed the land.”
The shadow will embrace all, the old mage had told me in the square. But it wasn’t any shadow; it was the Shadow.
I looked over the books on the table and considered the parchments, the artwork in the tombs, the mages’ riddles, and more. According to those tales, I was descended from the invading forces, those who’d survived and were poisoned by the flood of magic. Those banished from their lands, who’d found sanctuary in a young Brea. It explained how some Inner Circle people could use magic and why they were forbidden to do so. The combined explanations could go a long way in uncovering the truth. But Shaianna and the Eye?
“Shaianna wanted me to get the Eye to break our bond. And now she’s destroyed the Eye.”
“And the bond?”
I didn’t answer, which was answer enough. She had destroyed the Eye so there would be no way to break our bond. “I’ve seen what she can do and I wonder if it’s just the beginning.” It begins. “She is the Shadow, The Forgotten One, the Truth in the Lies. She is the queen’s vengeance, cursed into the cup and buried alongside the remains of her people.”
“Until the cup was found and you stole it. You woke her.”
“One of the people controlling the mages hired me to steal the cup. They knew it had been discovered. Perhaps they wanted to destroy it—destroy Shaianna before she regained her strength and fulfilled the queen’s wishes.” Some things should be destroyed. “They wanted her stopped before she was strong enough to fight back.”
Was that why she had destroyed the Eye? Because she no longer needed it? She was ready. Revived. She’d come back for revenge.
“If she is one of the Forgotten Ones the queen used in battle,” Fallford considered, “what is she planning now? Arach is gone, as are her people.”
“I know exactly what she wants.” I didn’t want to believe it. I’d seen so much more of Shaianna than what these legends suggested. I’d held her crying in my arms, but I’d also witnessed the quick flash of her blade and the stone heart with which she killed. I knew all too well how dangerous she could be, and I’d left her with Agatha. A killer who’d returned to this land for one purpose. “Do your books say any more about the Forgotten Ones? Where they came from?”
“Myths, legends, far-fetched tales. The Forgotten Ones, plural, were only called upon in the most dire of times because they killed without discrimination. Some tales say the queen had doomed her people the moment she summoned the Forgotten One. They are killers. Some texts refer to them as the hunger, and all call them monsters in their own language.” He lifted a sorry look to me. “There is nothing good written about them.”
“What happened to them? Did they all burn, like the Arachians?”
“It seems they vanished. There is some mention of them”—he brushed his fingertips over a foreign word—“waiting.”
For a better time. My heart sank and I turned away. “I have to get back—”
Fallford caught my arm. “Vance, the mages, the people corrupted by magic, they’re still here, aren’t they? The killings in the city, the slaughter in the market. It’s all related.”
The truth. He and others like him—those high enough in Brean society to make a difference—had to know. “There are hundreds of them, maybe thousands. I think—I hope if Shaianna is everything you say, then she perhaps returned to kill those the queen missed the first time around. Or, at least, their descendants. The ones turned mage.”
I didn’t know what she was waiting for. Over a month had passed since we found the Eye, and she clearly no longer needed it. Why wait?
“Where are the mages coming from?” Fallford asked.
“The spire.”
/> “The Inner Circle?” He scoffed. “Those things are coming from inside the wall? The heart of Brea? How do you know this?”
“I’m the one that got away.” And I had to go back.
Tired of snow-caked boots and the bitter air biting my lips, I dipped into a nearby Inn and pilfered a few gems from those staving of the cold inside, and paid for a carriage ride back to the pleasure house. While it bumped and skipped its way through the streets, I went over Fallford’s findings again and again. I didn’t want to believe it, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t true. Some things I couldn’t deny. The mages. The Eye. The tomb with the wall art matching Fallford’s tales. I’d left as he’d begun talking about mounting an expedition to Arach. They wanted to find the tomb and see it with their own eyes before reaching any conclusions. I wasn’t sure Brea had the luxury of time. He’d wanted to hire me as a guide. I’d told him I’d consider it and then promised to show him the tunnel into the Inner Circle, but not without weapons. Many weapons.
The carriage jolted and shifted sharply to one side, abruptly halting. The horses shied, and then the driver banged a fist on the roof to signal my ride was over.
The metallic tang of blood—I could taste it in the air, like I had when I discovered Daryn’s body. I stepped from the carriage and saw a crowd loitering outside the pleasure house. The piled-up snow had turned brown with churned blood. With every step I took, my thoughts numbed.
There’s too much. It cannot all be blood.
“Let me through …” I shoved and elbowed my way through the crowd and stumbled into a clearing.
“Sir, please stay back.” A city guard waved a bloodied hand at me, but I could hardly see him and barely heard his words. Agatha’s body lay sprawled in the snow at the foot of the front steps, her guts steaming in the cold air.
“Sir.”
“I don’t—” I mumbled.
Someone grabbed my arm. “Step back.”
Legends of the Damned: A Collection of Edgy Urban Fantasy and Paranormal Romance Novels Page 62