Tassen tipped his hat. “Always.”
“Vance, as you’re already familiar with the area, you go with the captain. Do not engage the mages. Report back with your findings. Tiber, approach your senior officer with this information.”
“They’ll want to know its source,” Tiber grumbled.
“Then wait for Tassen and Vance’s return. The captain can vouch as to the tunnel’s significance.” Nodding at both Tassen and me, Fallford added. “We shall await your return,”
Tassen’s small group of seafaring crewmen obeyed their captain without fault, leaving me little to do besides offer directions. I told them where the entrance was and hung back as they shifted the barrels only to find it locked from within. I’d lost my picks, but after scrounging some thin pieces of metal from the crew’s rigid boots, I broke open the lock easily enough. Inside the tunnel, torches spluttered, illuminating damp stone walls. We hadn’t gone far before I suspected the trip would be a wasted one. We should have been hearing evidence of the mages, but the quiet was too thick, broken only by the scuffing of our boots. We breached the spire’s internal chamber and discovered the cells were empty.
The cell doors hung open. The platform with its mosaic floor and pedestal was exactly as I’d described it, but even in the gloom, it was clear nobody was here and hadn’t been for some time.
“That passageway takes you out to the Inner Circle streets,” I said, my voice echoing into the blackness the torchlight failed to penetrate. “It was guarded before.”
“Is it guarded now?”
“Your guess is as good as mine.”
Tassen’s men wandered around, kicking over extinguished torches. They whispered among themselves, instinctively keeping their voices low.
Patches of crusted blood marked the stones where Shaianna had stabbed Anuska.
Tassen noted it, and then lifted his torch to gauge the whereabouts of his men. “It’s as you said, but missing one vital component.”
“The mages.”
“Indeed. It’s mighty difficult to rouse the city guard without evidence, Vance.” He looked again at the opposite passageway, likely wondering if he could break into the Inner Circle and find evidence inside.
He might have taken his men that way had a rumbling not shaken the foundation of the spire and us with it. I’d heard of incidents across the sea, where the earth shook and toppled buildings, but I had never experienced it. Stones and grit clattered and bounced against the floor. Small stones rained from above. One of Tassen’s men cried out. I caught the flicker of his torchlight as it seemingly shot upward into the black and then vanished.
The rumble deepened. It shook the air and rattled against my chest. “We need to leave!”
Shielding his head with one hand, Tassen ventured toward where his men staggered, illuminated in their dark by the halo of light thrown from their torches.
Something brushed by me in the dark. Air fluttered against my face, jolting my heart. I turned my torch toward it but saw only raining debris. A low-level grumble joined the noise of shifting earth.
Something else was here with us.
Not a mage. A fearful shiver skittered down my back. I tossed my torch back the way we had come. It slipped and skidded across the floor and halted not far from the exit passageway, illuminating the way out. The grumbling ceased. A few more stones clattered around us. Heavy, suffocating silence filled the spire. Tassen’s men started moving toward my torch, when a vast blur of movement knocked the last man in the line clean off his feet. He hit the wall and fell in a heap.
“Run!” I barked. They hadn’t seen it. They couldn’t. Their torchlight blinded them to the dark. But I saw something—a presence in the dark—and felt the weight of something huge, something powerful. Whispers raised the fine hairs on my arms.
Two huge emerald eyes pierced the black.
Tassen and his men ran for the passageway. The eyes watched them disappear inside the tunnel mouth.
I pushed back against the cool wall, and hoped, without a torch spotlighting me in the dark, that the beast didn’t see me. The eyes blinked slowly. Snuffling sounds filled the spire, the rumbling started up again, and the eyes blinked out. Darkness once more folded around the beast.
Time dragged as I waited for all sounds to cease. Eventually, the grit stopped falling and the rumbling faded until all I could hear was blood pumping hot and loud in my ears. I carefully inched my way along the wall toward the burning torch, moving silently into the tunnel.
Chapter Twenty-Two
“I lost two of my crew, Fallford!” Tassen paced in the library. “Two families ruined. I’ll have to inform their wives. And what do I tell them? I’ve never seen anything like it. I’m not even sure what I saw. It was too big to see all at once. I caught blurs, shadows, movement. Nothing solid. Nothing I could aim at.”
“Slow down, Tassen,” Fallford urged. “You’re saying there were no mages there. Nothing of that nature?”
“Nothing but a wretched nightmare.”
“Can you better describe it?” Lady Porter asked.
“No, I told you I didn’t see it. You couldn’t see it. But it shook the earth.”
“Is the Inner Circle hiding it from us?” Tiber asked from the window, where he’d been leaning in silence, watching and listening as before. “Is it a weapon?”
“We were about to break out into the Inner Circle when it revealed itself,” Tassen replied. “Plucked one of my men right into the air. Gone. The restless gods only know where his body is.” Tassen stopped pacing and looked straight at me. “You’re quiet, Vance. You saw it too. Shit, you were the last to leave. Did you see more than me? Tell me it wasn’t what I remember. Tell me it has an explanation.”
I was slumped in the chair by a cold, dark fireplace, going over and over how the eyes had glowed and its magic had licked across my skin. I didn’t want to share these things with Tassen or Fallford’s colleagues.
“No more than you,” I lied.
“That thing. You didn’t see that in the spire before, Vance?”
Anger flared hot in my veins. “I would have told you, wouldn’t I?”
“Wouldn’t you?”
“His word is worthless,” Tiber snarled. “How was this not an ambush, just as Tassen had feared? This thief lured you in there. He was born there; he is likely working for the Inner Circle—”
Porter’s voice rose and joined the discontent, either defending me or berating me, but I didn’t care to listen. Fear churned in my stomach and shook through my tense muscles.
I pushed from my chair and strode from the room.
“Vance …” Fallford’s footfalls beat on the soft hallway carpet after me. “Don’t you prove me wrong and prove them right.”
I stopped at the top of the stairs, my hand resting on the bannister. “I wasn’t leaving.” I glared at him side-on. “I just …”
“You saw more, but you will not say. Why?”
I tightened my grip and eyed the entrance door below—my way out. “I’ve seen its kind before.”
“Then don’t keep this information from us.”
“You can’t do anything, Fallford. Your friends can’t save themselves from this. Our pistols and short swords are useless against it.”
“What was it? You know … Tell me. Tell them. By the gods, man, keeping it to yourself won’t help anyone.”
“In Arach. The tomb.” I leaned against the bannister, needing the support. “I told you I climbed a huge monument to get the Eye?”
“A dragon statue, yes.”
“What if we’ve gotten this all wrong? What if the mages are just … by the by—just a mistake, a distraction? Or perhaps the mages were a misguided attempt to control something else entirely. What if the real threat is something far worse?” I needed a drink. Several drinks. “In your books, the constant references to the earth, to stone—to how the queen summoned the wrath from the earth. What if the mages aren’t the worst of this? What if the monument in the tomb
was once real?”
“Is that what you saw in the spire?”
“I don’t know how it got in there or why it’s there now, but I saw something I can’t explain. Something as large as the dark filling that place. I saw its eyes; they were exactly like the jewel I stole, the Eye. I don’t know what to believe.” I smiled a tight, nervous smile that instantly fell away. “We’ve forgotten the past, and now it rises from the shadow and dust.” I turned and jogged down the stairs, telling Fallford over my shoulder, “Tassen will believe me. He saw the tomb; he already knows. He’s seen as much as I have, but the others will never believe me until it’s too late. Tell them what you will. It hardly matters. We have no defense against the past.”
I didn’t care to see the expression on his face. He should be afraid. I was.
I found Molly in the kitchen and asked for something potent and liable to make me forget. She poured me a syrupy, sweet concoction of her own making. A grape liquor, she called it. It warmed my throat and went a long way in filling the emptiness fear had carved out of me.
“Not too much, mind, or you’ll be regretting it,” she warned, her smile telling me she was speaking from experience.
“Molly, I have many regrets, but your fine liquor could never be one of them.”
“Ah, a smooth talker too. I can see I’ll have to warn the other maids as well as count the crockery, if you’ll be staying with us, sir.”
“I am. Fallford has offered me board while I am … in his employ. And don’t call me sir. Tell me something of your life with Fallford. Distract me, please, while the well-to-doers and the captain argue over the impossible.”
“You’re not with them?”
“I’m not with anyone, Molly. Alone is how I like it.” I wiped the back of my hand across my lips before their quiver could give me away.
She tossed her drying cloth aside and brushed her hair out of her eyes. “Well, sir thief, seems to me you got yourself some trouble. Is it lady trouble? You got that jilted look about you.”
I swallowed a large gulp of her drink and winced. “It’s more like the I don’t want to die kind of trouble, but I suppose you could say there’s a woman involved. A beautiful, complicated woman possibly capable of monstrous things, if I am to believe the facts.”
“Sounds like most women.” Molly sat opposite me and poured herself a drink. “I don’t s’pose milord will begrudge me a sip if I am to console his newest employee.”
I chinked my glass with hers. “To ignorance.”
A soft, unassuming smile warmed her face. “That’s a broken heart talking.”
“You can’t break a stone heart.” Like Shaianna’s. Fallford thought me afraid for my life. He thought he was saving me from my own cowardice. What he didn’t know, what even I wasn’t sure of, was that I wasn’t afraid for me. I was afraid for Shaianna, for what she might be and for the choice I feared she had already made. The wrong choice.
I just wanted to know if she was safe and that, if the beast in the spire got free, Shaianna would survive it. She deserved to live, but first she had to keep the dark at bay.
Fallford joined me some time later and ushered Molly away while he poured himself a drink. By then I was slumped in the chair, and I had lost count of the number of times I’d refilled my glass.
“Where are your intrepid explorers?” I didn’t sound drunk, at least not to my ears, but my thoughts weren’t entirely grounded and I wasn’t sure how well I’d be walking.
“Tassen has returned to his ship. He’s reconsidering his involvement,” Fallford said, leaning back in his chair. He loosened his collar and took a generous mouthful of grape liquor. “The others have left, for now. It is late and nobody seems inclined to move forward.”
I wasn’t entirely surprised. It was one thing to pledge your support of an idea, and an entirely different thing to lose two lives to that idea.
“You should have told me Tassen was on your payroll.”
“He protected my identity, as you have in the past. I didn’t feel it necessary to tell you before now.”
“He came to my house, said you wanted to meet?”
“Ah, yes. You must understand. The Eye is—was everything. I asked Tassen to keep you occupied. I was to search for the Eye myself, but the mages had already done so.”
I almost choked on my drink. “You were going to steal it—from me—despite our deal?”
“Vance, time is short. I feared what might become of the Eye. As it happens, I was right.” Fallford chuckled. “Come now, a thief by trade and you’re offended by my actions?”
“I... you do not seem the sort.”
He nodded. “I made my fortune from the mines. My title is an earned one, not inherited. I’m not adverse to getting my hands dirty.”
I respected him more for that. “And now?”
“I retired after my son’s death and pursued antiquities. But it was the mines that sparked my curiosity.” He gazed at the kitchen window but wasn’t seeing the snowflakes patting gently against the glass. “The workers had a tradition. Every morning, before their day began, they would offer up a stone to the restless gods. Just a stone, something they’d picked up from the road. Nothing more. They called it payment for safe passage through the earth.”
I wet my lips from the glass before speaking. “There’s a similar tradition on the moors.”
“Yes.” He smiled. “I considered it nonsense. The mine captain at the time told me they offered a stone because we were taking from the earth, and so we should give back.” Fallford tapped his fingers on the side of his glass. “Over time, the pile of tributes grew into a shrine of sorts. But the mine grew and the shrine had to be demolished to make way for expansion. The next day, a lode collapsed, crushing two hundred men.” His expression tightened. “I was reminded of this when researching Arach. The people there had embraced the visitors, with one warning: not to steal anything from their city.”
The earth had power—a latent energy most Brean folk had never been aware of. Shaianna knew of it. I’d seen her weave it around her on that moorland night.
“We are facing something we do not understand,” I said. Fallford met my eye. “I do not like our chances.”
“I’m not a religious man, nor am I prone to believe in fantastical tales, as much as I adore hearing them. But you are right, Vance. I don’t think we can rely on our existing knowledge. We need to look into the myth and search for the truth.”
The truth in the lies. I tipped my drink in agreement. “That is easier said than done.”
“Your lady friend?”
I am no lady. Despite the weight of my discoveries, my lips lifted into a small smile. “I’ve no idea where she is.” Or what she is, I added silently.
“And what of you, Vance? You were born inside the Inner Circle. That makes you one of them. Do you have the same potential in you?”
“Are you asking if I can harvest magic from gems, or if I’m about to turn mage?”
“Both.”
“The only magic I know is sleight of hand. As for turning mage? I’m just a thief.”
“You heal. You told me you should have died on several occasions.”
“That was her doing.”
“Was it?”
I downed the rest of my drink and stood, swaying a little, but the table helped steady me. “You know everything I know.”
“Tell me why you’re really afraid.”
I was about to say the obvious—mages were hunting me—but it wasn’t that. I dragged a hand down my face and cleared my throat. “Inside the spire, when Tassen and his men ran—” I gripped my chair, holding myself steady while the room blurred at the edges. “I should have been afraid, like they were, but I wasn’t. Not really. That beast inside, whatever it is, knew I was there, and it watched … It watched like the thing in my dreams. It knew me.” I sighed. “I’m afraid of what that means.”
“You’re part of this, at the heart of it even?”
I didn’t answer, bu
t I didn’t need to, and left the room to find solace in my bed. I hoped I’d drunk enough not to dream of falling.
She came to me, in my dreams, where I had no desire to stop her, a blur of dark hair and the glitter of jewels against her pale skin. I heard her laughter, rich and bright, and I watched her from afar. She danced in the summer meadow outside the ruins of her home and lifted her face to the sun. I had never wanted someone more. I wanted to steal her away, but the darkness came. Growls rumbled from the trees and wargs breached the tree line, teeth dripping, yellow eyes bright. A shadow fell over me, blocking out the sun and plunging the ruins into darkness. Cold rushed in. I turned to warn her and saw my sister. Shaianna had my sister hugged against her, the jeweled dagger at her throat. My sister’s eyes said sorry.
“I knew …” she said. “I always knew.”
“Curtis.”
I bolted upright, breathing hard, the sound of my sister’s name still echoing through my head. Cold air blasted in through the open window and around the hooded figure. Shaianna crouched in the window, poised and unsure, her face hidden in shadow.
“Shaianna? By the gods, princess.” The dream still stalked my thoughts, and my lightheadedness had me wondering whether she was here at all, or if my memories had brought her to life.
She dropped from the sill and quietly closed the window. I propped my head up on a hand and watched her turn toward me. She unclipped her cloak and let it fall. She looked the same now as when she appeared in the dockside alley, something untamed and unforgiving, cold and raw. Her dagger glinted at her thigh. Its twin was tucked away inside my bedside drawer. I didn’t think I’d need it, but her smile wasn’t the slight, subtle smiles I’d seen from her before. This new smile had an edge to it.
“How did you find me? You shouldn’t be here. If Fallford …” My voice and thoughts trailed off as she strode forward, her steps so light I barely heard them.
“Shh.” She placed a knee on her edge of the bed and climbed over me, straddling my legs. It was a good thing the dream had left me breathless else she may have noticed how my breaths quickened. “Don’t talk,” she commanded.
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