by Neil McGarry
The hallway leading to the stairs was crowded with costumed guests, but fortunately for her they were all looking towards the bend of the hallway, craning their heads to see above the crowd gathered before the gallery doors, waiting for Eusbius to finish his speech and show them his new toy. They paid her no mind as she slipped through the door and threaded her way down the hall. The Brutes were nowhere to be seen and she didn't want to think what that might mean. Still, it was best not to linger, so she hurried down the stairs and across the second floor, passing the still-closed door to Agalia's day room. The balconies were vacant, and looking over the railing she saw that the ballroom was empty as well, save for a few stragglers who lacked either the interest or the sobriety to tackle the stairs to the gallery. She didn't see Lysander anywhere, and she hoped the Brutes had done nothing more than throw him out of the house. Any harm Lysander had suffered was her doing, if only indirectly.
As she descended to the ground floor, she saw that one of the stragglers in the ballroom was Malia, making herself a plate from the remnants of the food on the tables. Duchess pulled the cloak more tightly about her; if the cook saw her she would have questions Duchess could never answer. Fortunately, Malia seemed more intent on eating than in looking around, and Duchess passed unnoticed through the ballroom and into the hall, and came finally to the kitchen. Scattered about the room were pots – washed and unwashed – extra food, plates, cups and innumerable other culinary accessories. There were also several lamps hanging from hooks, which she'd need in the darkness of the cold house. As she lifted one, she spied a large piece of roast, evidently deemed unsuitable for fine company. It was cold, dry and stringy, but in that moment it tasted very fine indeed. She hadn't eaten since lunch, and despite the danger was suddenly ravenous. Chewing, she stepped out into the night and hurried across the courtyard to the cold house. The guards on the postern gate paid her no attention, although that would change as soon as the alarm was raised. Which would be any moment.
She made her way down the steps and found to her great relief that the door to the cold house was closed but still unlocked, probably because no one with keys had found time to lock it. She hung the lantern by the door and poked around the shelves until she came up with a wad of cheesecloth. Wrapped tightly around the piece of tapestry, it would not keep the dagger dry, but it might save her from getting cut. Or so she hoped. She tore off a strip of the cloth and used it to tie the dagger against her; she hadn't gone through all of this to lose her prize to the city's sewers. She shrugged off the cloak and flung it aside; in the water such a heavy garment would only weigh her down and likely get her drowned.
Duchess crouched on the edge of the channel, her hands gripping cold, rough stone. She took a deep breath to steady herself, tasting metal. She shivered. Even though spring ruled above, down here winter held dominion. The water that flowed through the channel two feet below her would be cold, passing from darkness into darkness, and she swallowed hard. She was terrified now that she had come to it, and part of her wondered if there were some other way. She could very easily drown in the long, wet dark, or become trapped just past the arch only to be fished out by the baron's men…or by the Brutes, which would be even worse. But the estate walls were smooth and tall and she was no acrobat. No one would open a gate for her even if she had the coin for a bribe. There was no other way.
There were shouts from the courtyard above, and she could imagine the baron's men fanning out, double-guarding the exits, beating the bushes and searching every shadow. They would be hindered by crowds of ghosts and gods, but in the end they would find her. She was out of time. It was either a blind jump or the baron’s justice.
She jumped.
* * *
There was a moment, between the edge of the channel and the surface of the water, for regret. Then the tunnels swept that, and everything else, away. The bottom of the channel, worn smooth by decades of flowing water, was slippery as ice, and Duchess' feet flew out from under her. She landed heavily on her back with a splash and was pushed under the arch along with the current. Her world became darkness, cold wetness, and the echo of rushing water.
When she had first concocted the idea of using the cold house to escape, she had thought she would have to swim through the tunnels that carried the water, but instead she was swept along like debris. She reached out with her hands, scrabbling against the tunnel walls and ceiling to slow her progress, and felt one of her fingernails tear out in a blaze of pain. She yelped and got a mouthful of water for her trouble. Coughing and choking, she bounced helplessly along, striking the tunnel walls here and there, trying desperately to keep her head above water. The tunnel was getting lower, and if it narrowed much more would fill entirely. Then she'd drown like a rat. Her dress bunched up around her waist as she rushed feet-first into the dark, and for the second time that night she regretted not having worn trousers. Then her head struck the stone overhead, setting her ears to ringing. The rush of water, the feel of cold stone, and the endless dark surrounded her. The dagger came loose from where she'd tied it around her body and she clutched it tightly, trusting that she'd wrapped the blade well enough to keep it from slicing her hands.
She had no idea how long it went on, moments, days or years. Once the tunnel bent to the right, and she scraped a foot and smashed a knee as she washed around it. The channel seemed endless, and in it was nothing but cold, fear and rushing water. She was nearly numb, and she was certain that by now her skin must be blue, though in the dark all was black. She no longer even tried to control her progress. Fighting was meaningless. She could now only trust the water and the tunnel.
The tunnel promptly betrayed her by dropping suddenly away. She fell like a stone, but her scream was cut short as she struck deeper water that reached nearly to her neck. The wrapped dagger flew from her hands and she flailed about wildly in the wet and sightless dark. Duchess was enveloped by the sound of water striking water and she realized that she must be in a cistern of some kind, one that collected the flow from the tunnel. The sound was music to her ears. She turned her face into the downpour and laughed, barely able to hear herself over the roaring fall. She was dark and cold, but she was alive, mostly uninjured and not whizzing helplessly through the dark. She moved away from the fall towards what she assumed was the center of the chamber, feeling carefully around her for the dagger. Hopefully, the cloth wrappings would keep it afloat for awhile; if not, everything she'd done tonight was lost. Her fingers brushed a soft object and she snatched it up. It took a few moments for her numbed fingers to recognize she held a dead rat. She flung it away with a disgusted cry and felt something brush against her right side. She jerked back, slapping at the something, and recognized the soaked but familiar shape of the wrapped dagger. She groped clumsily at it and tried to slow her breathing, to think clearly. She held tight to the package with both hands as if to steady herself. It was the last mile, if she could only walk it. She felt along the wall of what seemed to be a circular chamber for some kind of door or opening, but found nothing but slimy brickwork. As she circumnavigated the room she was doused several times by water falling from other tunnels. The water didn't bother her as much as the things she felt in the water. More dead rats, or worse. She didn't want to think about it.
"I'm under the city," she said to herself. It was a comfort to hear a human voice, even if only her own. "I'm in a room of water and there's no way out. It will fill with water and then…" And then what? She breathed deeply, trying to calm herself. The water had to go somewhere, that was certain, otherwise it would back up into the tunnels and eventually into the cold houses of the various nobles and into the streets. The city authorities would never stand for that. So where did the water go? She moved back to the center of the room to get away from the drenching water and collect her thoughts. The water flowed from the top of the city down the hill to the harbor, everyone knew that even if they didn't know how. So how did the water get from this room to the harbor?
She thought o
f her father then, rational and calm, and never at a loss. "Up," she said to herself. "When the water gets too high it runs into more tunnels that are higher along the wall. That's how this place was built." In truth she had no idea what the builders of the Rodaas sewer system had thought, but the notion sounded so right that she began feeling along the walls again, this time reaching higher. Sure enough, her questing fingers found the lip of a circular tunnel approximately one foot above her head. She thought (hoped) it was large enough to accommodate her, and gripping the cloth-wrapped dagger in her teeth (tasting sewer water) she pulled herself up, ignoring the protests of her tired muscles and the sizzle of pain as she scraped the knee she hadn't smashed in the tunnel.
She found herself in a round passage wider than the channel through which she'd been flushed but no less dark. Still, she could at least walk mostly upright, and that was something. She shuffled blindly along, away from the cistern and the sound of rushing water, one hand on the wall beside her and the other clutching the dagger. The tunnel was black as pitch but sloped gently downwards, which was a small comfort; sooner or later she must come to the harbor and the surface, and then she could make for the Shallows. She hoped.
* * *
She didn't know how long she wandered; time was without meaning in a darkness that was more complete than any she had known. It was as if someone had painted the air itself black. With nothing to see, every other sensation acquired new starkness: the smell of dirty water, the splash of her own footsteps, the roughness of bricks beneath her fingers. The sounds of her heartbeat and her own breath seemed almost deafening. She felt dizzy and disoriented, and she was glad there were no forks in the tunnel from which to choose. These tunnels and channels were as much a part of Rodaas as the Shallows, or Beggar's Gate, and if her father's books could be believed, far older. In that moment it seemed she could feel every ounce of stone and soil and wood and brick in the city, pressing down upon her as certainly as each passing year pressed down upon the city. And each of those years was filled to bursting with the thoughts and fears of every soul who lived upon the great hill, their lives and their struggles and their deaths, to which the daily mists had borne silent witness. In a city so full of secrets, nothing concealed like fog. Were the sewers the only place the brume never reached?
Suddenly the right wall fell away beneath her hand and she stumbled, the wrapped dagger flying out of her grip and into the darkness. Her left foot twisted painfully and she fell, her knee exploding in pain as she hit the ground like a stone. When the screaming in her knee quieted to a grumble she cast about in the dark for the dagger. It was the second time that evening she'd dropped it, and she was not planning on a third. As she groped along the tunnel floor, she felt cold air to her right, and realized that there must be an opening there. With her left hand she continued to search for the dagger, while her right quested out to discover a low arch in the wall, perhaps four feet high and nearly that wide. The air from that opening was cold, far colder than the chill of the tunnel; she must have found a tunnel that led not down to the harbor but deeper into the great hill.
Just then her fingers touched cloth, and she seized the wrapped dagger and pulled it close. Only when she clutched it to her chest did she realize that it, too, was cold, even through the swaddling cheese cloth. Colder even than the new tunnel's air, or the water it had fallen into. It was as if the blade itself were generating a chill. Had the thing always been this cold? She held it up to the air flowing from the archway, and only then realized that she knew this feeling. She'd lived with it and feared it all her life.
The fog.
Her heart fluttered in her chest; the fog had found her, even here deep under the city, and now the words of the Domae woman echoed in her mind. Steel had laughed then at the silly girl who believed any story she was told, who feared the fogs when there were so many real things to be afraid of in Rodaas, but Silk knew what lay at the end of the dark road that sloped down, down into the darkness.
He Who Devours.
She drew a trembling breath. The woman had said his mark was upon her, and she had spoken more truly than she knew. For the coin in her pocket was surely His mark, and it had put her on the path that led here, to this tunnel. She knew why the dagger was so cold she could feel it through the cloth; He Who Devours had sent her to fetch it, and now He was calling it home. The fog was His herald and His messenger, and now they both awaited her, below.
A madness overtook her, and hardly able to believe it she leaned towards the opening, her eyes and ears straining in that wet darkness for the gray figure she had seen in her dreams. It knew her name, and not Duchess or Silk or Steel. It knew Marina Kell, and they'd met on that long-ago day when she'd first seen the mist rising to envelop the city. She slid towards the opening in a daze of horror, ready to move through the archway and into His arms.
Anassa had said the dagger had ruined greater than she. A prophecy, then, and one about to come true.
And in that moment she remembered her father. Her father who had seen the fog and pulled her away from it. "Let us go in; the fog is rising," he'd said. She heard the words as clearly as if he were beside her, and they broke the spell. She scrambled to her feet and ran away from the dreadful arch, through tunnels built by the dead and the forgotten, splashing numbly through water as cold as any fog. There was no more pain from her knee or her torn fingernail, and she ran as if all the demons of myth that had crowded Eusbius' halls were behind her.
She ran until her side ached and her lungs blazed, and she finally collapsed against the tunnel wall, breathless and wobbly-legged. That strange chill was behind her, and the dagger in its wrappings was once more just a stolen knife.
Fog did not come from inside the earth but off the harbor, she told herself. That archway was just another tunnel, perhaps built by the long-departed Domae. And as for who had planned this little enterprise...it was Hector, and not some Domae legend that had sent her after the blade. Steel said all these things, but Silk whispered that she'd passed some kind of test, and somehow that thought comforted her.
She ran wet fingers through wet hair and shuddered a few breaths to calm herself. At least the stink had faded; either that or she'd simply gotten used to it. It was strange to think she'd started at a home in the higher districts, had moved to the Shallows, and now found herself half-drowned amongst rats in the sewers beneath the city. At least it was unlikely that she could fall any lower.
She smiled wearily and resumed her progress along the tunnel.
* * *
She thought the dark might go on forever, so when she first made out the shape of bricks beneath her feet she thought it only the trickery of tired eyes. But no, the tunnels she stood in were now dimly lit, and she looked up to see a narrow rectangular opening in the tunnel roof that showed a slice of night sky. Looking ahead, she could see another such slit, and realized that she’d seen these openings from the other side; they drained water from the streets after a rain, and were used by commoner and noble alike to dispose of waste. They were too small for her, true, but they admitted a tumble of moonlight to show the way. She blessed Sar under her breath, imagining him with Lysander’s golden curls. She was sure now that the stink of the sewers had lessened somewhat; she must be going the right way. And so she stumbled through the dark with only her hands and brief moonlight to guide her.
That errant thought of Lysander had been a mistake, for now the floodgates of her memory opened again and there he was before her. He'd thought she was crazy to use the cold house to escape House Eusbius, and a part of her wondered if he'd been right. "That's one big risk," he'd pointed out when she'd shared her plans. "You don't know that the water under that cold house goes anywhere. It could just be a pool of water that's cold just because it's underground. Cellars are cold, too, you know."
She'd shaken her head. "Not like a cold house. It's the water running under the cold house that chills it, I'm sure of it. If the water comes from somewhere it must go somewhere. And ther
e has to be a lot of water, so the tunnel would have to be fairly deep."
"But how do you know? I've never seen a cold house from the inside, and neither have you." She wasn't sure how to answer that; by rights, few who lived in the Shallows had heard of cold houses, much less seen one. Fortunately for Duchess he pressed on. "And even if you're right, what if those tunnels just end somewhere, with no way out?"
"They can't just end, Lysander," she soothed him, although she could have used some soothing herself. "All that water has to go somewhere. You've seen the pipes at the harbor, right? And the water that spills out of them? That's the water from up the hill, running down into the harbor. Well, where the water can go, I can follow."
He ran his hands through his hair. "OK…let's say there are tunnels that go all the way down the hill. Who can say they're all wide enough for you? Water can go where you can't. You could get stuck and drown!" Panic edged his voice, and she felt a stab of guilt. He was almost frantic with worry and she couldn't even be honest about why her knowledge of cold houses surpassed what a Shallows girl should know. In the end she'd convinced him only by sheer force of personality and the trust he had in her, which left her feeling shamed and a little ill. She longed to share her secret with him, but Noam's training held hard.
Or was it Noam's training? She'd spent a good deal of her life evading and, where she dared, outright defying the old baker's rules. Why had she treated his warning about her past differently? Did she think Lysander couldn't be trusted?
The weight of the lies she'd told over the years seemed as heavy as the city above her. She gasped another sob as she crept along in the darkness, and in that instant she wanted nothing more than to see him: her clever, bright and beautiful Lysander. She stumbled to a halt once more, one hand against the tunnel wall to keep from falling. Of all the people she'd met in the Shallows, Lysander had always taken care of her best. He was always at hand to share a meal or a choice bit of gossip, to drink with her at the Merry Widow, or just to sit in companionable silence. He had first seen the silk in her, and the steel.