The Guns of Empire
Page 49
Without looking back, he went to the door and rapped. The guard outside began the laborious process of dragging it open.
“Ionkovo,” Janus said.
“What?”
“Ionkovo is with Orlanko. Be careful.”
Marcus blinked rapidly. “Thank you.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
WINTER
The path that Snowfox, Alex, and Maxwell led them on didn’t even qualify as a trail. It was more like a series of markers—a boulder here, a narrow gap there, a rocky shelf that looked impassable but, on close inspection, had a crack in it just wide enough to descend. For a time they trekked across a glacier; underneath the recent snowfall, Maxwell told them, was a river of ice, which ran all the way to the sharp-edged tip of the mountain.
They went on foot, since no mount, however sure-footed, could have managed. In addition to the trio from the Mountain, there was Winter, Bobby, Sergeant Red, and a ranker named Millie Varner. Winter had asked for volunteers, and predictably all the soldiers had been ready to come with her, in spite of the dangers. Red had picked Millie for her off-battlefield skills. She’d been one of Jane’s Leatherbacks, and before that she’d been a street thief. She was small and dark haired, with a knack for blending easily into shadows. She and Red had left their muskets behind, borrowing short, straight-bladed swords of ancient manufacture from the armory at the Mountain. Winter wished they had more pistols, but the Eldest had had none to offer.
They’d departed just after dawn, under a clear blue sky that promised none of the vicious snow and wind of the past week. Snowfox mostly led the way, more comfortable on the rocks and snow than any of the adults. She scampered up cliff faces and across drifts of ice with all the casual indestructibility of youth, looking back when she got to the other side to see what was keeping everyone. She still hadn’t spoken more than a few words to Winter, though Winter caught the girl staring in her direction when she thought no one was looking.
When they paused at midday to eat a lunch of flatbread, boiled eggs, and dried meat, Winter sat down on a rock next to Snowfox. The girl froze for a moment, as though fighting the urge to flee, then went back to eating with a studied nonchalance.
“I wanted to ask about how we’ll be getting in,” Winter said, “and what we can expect once we’re inside.”
“It’s an old tunnel,” Snowfox said, looking down at her food. “Elysium is kept warm by hot springs from under the mountain. Where they come up, there’s a lot of very old pipes and passageways, and some of them the priests haven’t looked at in centuries. There’s a grate at the end, but it’s rusted through, and it leads into the basements.”
“Then what?”
The girl shrugged. “It depends where you want to go. Maxwell knows more about the interior than I do, but it’s a maze. And with most of the priests leaving, I’m sure everything is in chaos.”
Winter pursed her lips, but she’d expected that. Her tentative plan was to take the first person they met prisoner and demand information. Priests of the Black might rather die than give anything up, but no organization of that size could operate without menials to clean, cook, and so on. Those, Winter hoped, would not be quite so dedicated. The only flaw was that they probably wouldn’t know exactly where to find the poisonous Penitent, either.
Snowfox shuffled sideways, turning away from Winter. When Winter tried to catch her eye, the girl flinched.
“What’s wrong?” Winter said. “The Eldest said you could trust me, didn’t he?”
“It’s not that,” Snowfox said. “There’s something wrong with my demon. It feels . . . frightened, I think? More and more as we get closer to Elysium. And every time I look at you, it jumps a little.”
“You can sense other demons, even though they can’t sense you?”
She nodded. “Better than most people, the Eldest says. It’s part of what my demon does. Yours is stronger than anything I’ve ever seen, much stronger than mine or Alex’s. Abraham’s might come close. That might be why mine is so frightened.”
Winter reached out to Infernivore. She’d trained herself not to pay much attention to the thing’s sudden moods, since with Alex around it was generally just reacting to her presence. Now, with Snowfox’s power hiding Alex and even the tiny trace of power Bobby gave off, she expected to find the demon quiescent. Instead, it was fully awake, attention focused on the south. Toward Elysium. They were still too far to feel another demon’s presence, but there was definitely something there, like the glow of the sun when it was just below the horizon.
Maybe there are so many demons they all run together. That was a pleasant thought. Winter shook her head and turned back to Snowfox, who had apparently conquered her demon’s fear and was watching Winter carefully again.
“Where did you find your demon?” the girl said. “The Priests of the Black don’t have anything like it.”
“In Khandar,” Winter said. “On an archive a lot like the one your Eldest keeps, actually.”
“It must have been dangerous to read the name of something so strong.”
Winter remembered the feeling of being ripped apart as Infernivore had wrapped around her soul. “I suppose it was. I didn’t know at the time. There was a Penitent Damned trying to kill us.” Winter cocked her head. “What about you? How old were you when you read the name?”
“Ten. Too young, the Eldest said, but I had the best chance, and I said I wanted to do it. The last Snowfox had died of a fever, and it’s too important to the Mountain to take chances.” A shadow crossed her face. “My sister was supposed to be the new Snowfox. She tried to read the name when she was fourteen, but she . . . didn’t succeed.”
There was only one way to fail to read the name of a demon. Winter swallowed. “You’re very brave,” she said, and meant it. She couldn’t imagine how hard it would be to begin the incantation, knowing the likely outcome.
“It needed to be done,” Snowfox said simply. She stuck the last strip of meat in her mouth and got to her feet. “We should keep moving.”
—
The last few hours of the trek took them along a cleft in the mountain so narrow they were nearly underground. A great rock had split, leaving a jagged crevice a few feet wide and hundreds of feet deep. It was warm at the bottom, as though the rocks had been soaking in the sun of the Great Desol, and endless drips from melting snow pattered all around them. Farther up, snow and ice jammed in the crevice formed irregular crisscrossing bridges and archways, like a boulevard designed by a mad architect.
The entrance, when they finally found it, was so innocuous that Winter might have walked right by. A small pile of rubble marked a gap in the wall of the crevice, with a dark, warm space beyond. Red lit a lantern, and its light revealed a tunnel—narrow and close roofed, but definitely worked stone.
“That way goes to some of the sulfur pools,” Snowfox said. “The other way joins up with a larger passage and goes back to Elysium. Just keep going forward and you’ll find your way to the basement. You shouldn’t see anyone before the grate.”
“Thank you,” Winter said.
The girl put on a fierce expression, but there was a slight flush in her cheeks. “I’ll stay here for another day. If you can get back to me by then, I can shield you on your way out. If not, I’ll go back, and you’re on your own.” She paused. “I’m sorry I can’t come with you.”
“We understand,” Maxwell said, laying a hand on her shoulder. “You’re too valuable, and your duty is to the Mountain. We’re grateful to you for bringing us this far.”
“You know your way around in there?” Winter said to the priest.
“Not very well,” he said. “All we have are maps, but I’ve studied them. I’ll do what I can.”
“Okay.” Winter turned to the others. “Alex and Millie, you’re in front.” The two thieves would almost certainly be the quietest of the group. “Red, Bobby, make sure nobody sneaks
up on us. Maxwell, stay with me.”
Maxwell raised no objections to her taking command, for which Winter was grateful. When he nodded, she went on. “If you see anyone, try to take them alive, but remember that if the alarm goes up we’re already probably dead. So whatever you do, we can’t have any screams or shots.”
Millie gulped and nodded. Alex looked grim. At Winter’s gesture, the two of them slipped into the tunnel. Winter gave them a count of five, then entered herself, with Maxwell on her heels. Bobby and Red brought up the rear.
It was certainly claustrophobic. Maxwell carried the lantern, sending twisting shadows racing ahead of them. Even Winter had to walk slightly hunched, and Red and Maxwell were bent nearly double. There was a pipe bracketed to one wall, its brass fittings turning green with age, and the water it carried was hot enough to make it painful to the touch. Inside her multiple layers of thick cloth, Winter was sweating freely, and when the corridor joined up with another, larger tunnel at an angle, she called a halt so they could all shed their outer garments.
This new tunnel was wider but just as low ceilinged. More pipes fed in at various angles, running along the walls in thick bundles. They were of varying vintages, some empty and riddled with rusty holes, others comparatively new. After what seemed like an age, they reached the grate Snowfox had mentioned, mounted on hinges that had long ago rusted solid. It hung open just wide enough to admit one person at a time. Alex, dressed now in tight-fitting thief’s blacks, slipped through first, and Millie followed. Red, the largest of the group, got stuck on a protruding bar; Bobby bent it out of the way with a quiet squeal of protesting metal, which apparently surprised no one.
“We should be out of Snowfox’s range by now, right?” Winter whispered to Maxwell. When he nodded, she again turned her attention to Infernivore, and frowned. “Alex, can you feel anything?”
“Not . . . exactly.” Alex’s brow creased. “There’s something there, but it’s like I can’t quite find it. It’s sort of . . . diffuse?”
“Maybe the Black Priests have someone like Snowfox in their collection,” Maxwell said.
“That makes sense,” Winter said. Infernivore did feel eager, but its attention wasn’t aimed in any particular direction, as though the power it was sensing suffused the air all around her. “It’s going to make this harder, though. Alex, Millie, get a little farther out. We’re hoping to run into a lamp-lighter or a laundress or something.”
“Do the Priests of the Black do laundry?” Bobby said.
“Somebody’s got to wash all those sinister robes,” Millie said. “Otherwise they’d end up as the Priests of the Grayish Brown.”
There was a round of smiles. Winter was grateful for the levity, which helped keep her thoughts off the reality of her situation. Even if some of its inhabitants had fled, this was still Elysium, the heart of the Sworn Church. Ever since Khandar, she’d thought of it more as a malevolent force than a real place, but here she was walking its halls, hoping to kill one of the Penitent Damned right under the noses of the Priests of the Black. The only good thing is that it’s such a dumb plan I doubt they’ll expect us to try it.
For the headquarters of a sinister order, it was surprisingly ordinary-looking. Once they moved into the basement proper and out of the tunnels, the ceiling was higher and braziers at regular intervals lit the way. Some of the stonework was ancient and crumbling, while other parts looked freshly repaired; a brazier that had been tarnished nearly black with age stood beside one that might have been forged yesterday. All of Elysium was like that, Winter guessed—constructed, rebuilt, and added to incrementally over the centuries, with the most recent innovations sitting beside things that had been unchanged for a thousand years.
There were, in fact, laundries, great copper vats that were the terminus of some of the pipes they’d followed. Nobody seemed to be minding them at the moment, however, and they moved on. Other open doorways revealed storerooms full of soap and candles, stacks of tin plates in bins waiting to be washed, even toilets. It was a bit odd, Winter thought, to imagine the Pontifex of the Black sitting down for a long shit, and she grinned to herself as they moved past.
Up ahead there was a brief scuffle and then a sharp intake of breath. Winter hurried forward and found Alex with her arms around a young man in a dark gray robe, one of her hands over his mouth while the other held a knife to his throat. Another young man, similarly dressed, was slumped against the wall, feet kicking weakly as a slick of crimson poured from his slashed throat. Millie, gory knife in hand, was breathing hard.
“He was going to shout for the guards,” Millie said.
“It’s all right,” Winter said. “Bobby, help her stash him in one of the rooms, and we’ll use his robe to mop up the blood. If we blow out the brazier, nobody will notice for a while.” She turned to the living prisoner and switched to Murnskai. “You understand me? Nod carefully.”
The boy—it was a boy, not more than sixteen—nodded very slightly, exquisitely aware of the knife at his throat.
“If you scream, you’ll end up like him. Do you understand?”
Another nod. Winter caught Alex’s eye, and the thief removed her hand, keeping the knife in place.
“You didn’t have to kill him,” the boy said. “He wasn’t going to shout. There’s no guards here anyway. He was just trying to warn me.”
“Quiet,” Winter said. “Whisper. What do you mean there’s no guards?”
“Everyone’s in the cathedral. The pontifex’s orders. We were just sent out to fetch more food from the stores.”
“Who’s ‘everyone’?” Winter said. “The Black Priests?”
“Everyone,” the boy said miserably. “The Priests, the servants, even the prisoners from the deep cells. The pontifex has us all praying nonstop while he administers a personal blessing. I haven’t had my turn yet, but it won’t be long.”
“Why?” Winter said.
“I don’t know. It has something to do with Vhalnich. Brian says”—he swallowed, skin pressing against the knife—“said that Vhalnich was coming to destroy the Church, and the pontifex was preparing some sort of great magic that would get rid of him.”
“Wait.” Maxwell pushed his way forward. “You said the pontifex brought the prisoners out of the deep cells?”
The boy nodded. “A lot of them are in pretty bad shape, too. As pale as dead fish.”
Maxwell beckoned to Winter. Winter said in Vordanai, “Alex, get him to tell you how to get to the cathedral by a route where we won’t be seen.”
“Got it,” Alex said. “Then . . .” She glanced at the knife.
Winter’s throat went tight. “Just . . . gag him and tie him up. We’ll ditch him somewhere and be out of here before he’s found.”
There was, she thought, a little relief on Alex’s face. “Right.”
Winter took a few steps back down the corridor, with Maxwell behind her. “What’s going on?”
“Something’s very wrong,” Maxwell said. “The Eldest explained to you the purpose of the Black Priests, didn’t he?”
Winter nodded. “To keep the Beast imprisoned.”
“And as many other demons as they can catch. That’s what the deep cells are for. Only a few people are faithful enough to be trusted in the field as the Penitent Damned, and they get the most useful demons. The rest are kept in the dungeons until they die, when another host is found to keep that demon from arising in the wild. Most of them are never let out of their cells, much less brought together and taken somewhere to pray.”
“If the Church really thinks that Janus is coming to destroy them any day, maybe they’re just pulling out whatever they have left.”
“But those prisoners aren’t like the Penitents. They’re the ones who aren’t loyal to the Church, who can’t be trusted with their powers. Putting them all together is more likely to cause a riot than anything helpful.”
“It’s going to be hard to get to her if she’s in the middle of a mob.”
“If we can get a reasonable vantage point, Alex is as good as a rifle,” Winter said, glancing over her shoulder. Alex and Millie had hog-tied the young servant, with a strip torn from his robe forced into his mouth. “If the cathedral here is like the one in Vordan, there’ll be a gallery. That might be what we need.”
“Getting away afterward is going to be the hard part,” the priest said. His eyes lingered on Alex, Winter noted. “I hope you’ve got a plan.”
“One step at a time,” Winter said.
“The cathedral is aboveground,” Alex said. “Our friend gave me the route, but it comes up at the edge of the central square. If anyone’s watching, they’ll see us if we try to approach that way.”
“Let’s go as far as we can,” Winter said, “and see if we can find another way in.” She looked from Alex to Bobby and smiled. “We may have a few unconventional options.”
—
As Alex had said, the boy’s route led to a long stairway, upper steps coated with snow, that surfaced in a broad, flat square. Winter left the rest of the group behind and wormed her way to the top on her belly, letting as little show over the lip of the stairs as possible.
The square was big, maybe as big as Farus’ Triumph back in Vordan. Directly in front of her was a long, low building faced with white marble, its facade encrusted with statues and columns. A similar building mirrored it on the other side of the square, faced in red. Across from the steps was what had to be the cathedral, a monstrous stone construction that towered over its surroundings. A huge circular stained-glass window looked out like an eye from just below the peaked roof, at least three stories above the ground. Two asymmetrical towers, one fat and square and the other slender and round, rose from the two front corners. Like the rest of Elysium, its stone was a patchwork of fresh and weathered, which might explain the mishmash of architectural styles.