Web of Lies (The Hundred Halls Book 2)

by Thomas K. Carpenter

  "Maybe we're not going to figure out what it is," said Aurie. "But whatever it is, the six of us can handle it."

  "We know it has magic," said Pi. "That much we know."

  Using an app on Hannah's phone that she had for making maps for her role-playing games, they sketched out the plan. Since they didn't know what Grat was, nor did they want to straight-up murder him, the goal was to knock him out so they could question him and find out how to make him leave. If it came to it, they would resort to deadly magics, but they preferred not to.

  They decided to split the party and approach the house from the front and the back. Hannah argued against the tactic, claiming it always caused total party kills in her games, but the others accepted the plan.

  Aurie took Echo and Hannah to the front, while Pi took Rigel and Raziyah to the back. Rigel would signal when they were in place with a bird whistle. He started to go on about what birds were found in the city, but they cut him off, since the demon wouldn't know either. He decided on a whippoorwill.

  Hannah crouched behind the fence, while Aurie kept her hand on the gate and Echo crouched behind her. When they got to the door, Hannah would knock it down like a battering ram on her skates.

  "When we go inside," she whispered to Echo, "you stay at the door to protect our escape."

  She wasn't really worried about the escape, but didn't want him to get hurt. She didn't know if she'd be able to forgive herself.

  After ten minutes of waiting, Aurie got nervous. It shouldn't have taken them that long to get into position. Hannah looked equally worried.

  "Did we not hear it?" she asked Hannah in a hushed voice.

  "Not sure."

  Another ten minutes later, Aurie suspected something was wrong and crept towards the house to see if they'd gone inside already. She got halfway to the front door when a bird whistle rose above the house. It was the whippoorwill's song, but not by Rigel's lips, as he had a way of making a bird whistle sound like a summer day. By the time she realized this, it was too late. Hannah was already careening towards the front door, readying a spell to blast it wide open.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  A tabby cat leapt down from a ledge, sprinting down the alleyway between the stagnant puddles. The feline gave them a parting meow before disappearing through a hole in a fence. Rigel wiped his damp forehead. His black hair glistened with sweat.

  "You going to be okay?" asked Pi.

  Rigel swallowed heavily. "I'll be fine. I get nervous before a performance."

  Raziyah looked like she was about to remind him that it wasn't a performance, so Pi shook her off.

  "If you're not up for this, there's no shame in staying back," said Pi.

  He cleared his throat. "I'll be fine."

  Pi wasn't sure she believed him.

  The back of Grat's brick house had a wooden fence surrounding it. Pi opened the gate and stuck her head inside the backyard.

  A tap on the shoulder brought her around.

  "Did you hear that?" asked Raziyah, face pinched in concentration.

  "No," said Pi.

  Everyone was jumpy. The other two looked like she could play them like a violin. Pi was a little twitchy herself, but wasn't going to let them know it.

  After a deep breath, Raziyah put a finger to her lips and crept up the alleyway. The nerdy stone singer moved as if she were getting constantly shocked by static electricity. She stopped at a passage between two houses, gave the sign to hold for a second, and stepped inside it.

  Not seeing Raziyah made Pi nervous. If something happened, she wouldn't be able to help.

  She motioned for Rigel to stay put and jogged to the location Raziyah had disappeared. Right before she got there, the black girl stepped out and shrugged, looking visibly relieved.

  As they moved back to Rigel, Pi caught movement in the corner of her eye. Someone was watching them from the window of a nearby house. As they walked, Pi cast a spell, turning her palm into a flat mirror. Almost as soon as she directed the reflecting surface, the person disappeared, but not before she had identified the spy.

  Zayn.

  Everything seemed wrong.

  Pi froze, which she knew had probably given away that she'd seen him.

  Raziyah arched an eyebrow.

  "Wait here," said Pi, and moved into the backyard of the house she'd seen Zayn in. If he was spying on them, it had grave implications for what was happening in the Enochian District. Pi wondered if this "demon" wasn't a plant from the Cabal. What if this area had to do with the wish spell? Maybe they needed it to make it work? Kind of like the portal needed the extra faez to reach all the way to Egypt. She paused, deciding between confronting Zayn and taking the other two back to Aurie's group to abort the plan.

  Pi was on the back porch when she saw a man in a lime green Sundrop T-shirt ambling through the alleyway in a daze. By his slack expression and foot dragging pace, Pi knew it was one of the wakers that Aurie had told her about. She looked at the shining sun. Had Aurie been mistaken about their avoidance of daylight?

  She spied another waker, a blonde woman in a peasant dress, coming from the other direction. She had scales on her arms and neck indicating she was a non-human. Raziyah and Rigel had noticed. They motioned towards her, asking what to do.

  Zayn slipped out the front, moving into the next street. If she moved fast, she could catch him. Pi leapt over the railing and sprinted after him.

  His eyes were wide when she appeared in the street. He cast a spell, but she was faster. The impact of the force bolt knocked him from his feet.

  More wakers spilled onto the street, leaving their homes in twos and threes. The district wasn't as empty as Aurie thought.

  "I'm not your enemy," said Zayn as he climbed to his feet. "You shouldn't have come here."

  Before she could knock him back down, he motioned with his hand, blinding her. Pi feared the worst. When she opened her eyes, Zayn was gone.

  She ran back towards the others when a whistle ripped through the air. Pi knew that it hadn't come from Rigel. An explosion from the front of the house urged her to run faster. More wakers entered the alleyway. Soon they'd be overrun.

  Her heart leapt into her throat when she saw the body. Rigel lay on his stomach, a dark blotch spreading on his back. Pi checked him to find no pulse. Wakers surrounded her on both sides.

  She couldn't believe that he was dead, tugged on his shirt, trying to come to terms with it. Why did we let them join us? It's all my fault.

  The wakers closed on her.

  He had plans to join the summer theater tour. They'd even given him a spotlight performance based on The Last Mage. What about his mother? She'd lost her husband last year, and now her son? It wasn't right. It wasn't fair. Pi was shaking.

  There was no sign of Raziyah. Had she been kidnapped, or fled whatever had killed Rigel?

  Feeling like she had a target on her back, Pi searched around, expecting a giant bug like in the contest. But it was only more wakers.

  She didn't want to leave Rigel, even though he was dead. Why did these things have to be coming after her? She wanted to scream but feared drawing more down upon her.

  Before the wakers could grab her, she dodged around the slow-moving people toward the back of the house. A battle raged within.

  Pi locked the gate behind her. As she ran up the concrete path past manicured bushes, she pulled a handful of explosive seeds from her pocket.

  Something whizzed at her head from the side. Pi threw herself to the ground, barely avoiding a spinning blade. Only her verumancy-enhanced reflexes had saved her. She rolled onto her feet and threw two seeds at the fleeing figure. The explosions shattered windows.

  Two more seeds were at her fingertips, but she didn't throw them when she realized it was Raziyah who'd attacked her. The diminutive black girl disappeared behind the house.

  The feeling that they'd stepped into something much greater than they could handle nearly overwhelmed Pi. Rigel was dead. Raziyah had turned against t
hem. Only fear for her sister got her to put one foot in front of the other toward the back door.

  "Don't go in," said a familiar voice from behind her.

  Raziyah stood at the back gate. It rattled from the wakers trying to push their way in. The alley was filled with wakers like floodwaters built up behind a dam.

  "What are you doing?" asked Pi.

  The way Raziyah held herself was like she was a different person. The meek math nerd that was bad at her hall's magic looked more like an MMA fighter about to step into the ring.

  "I like you, Pythia. You and your sister both. So I'd rather not do what I had to do with Rigel. Leave now, and don't come back," she said.

  A scream from inside the house—Hannah's it sounded like—almost made her turn and run inside, but she knew if she did, then Raziyah would kill her.

  "Maybe I don't think you can," said Pi. "I've seen you in action. You can barely kill a bug on your own, let alone me."

  This seemed to amuse Raziyah. She took off her glasses and threw them at a tree limb. They landed and spun around the limb like a horseshoe. "You have no idea how hard it is to be bad at something you're oh-so-good at. At least when I was doing stone singer work, the mediocrity was real. I'll give you one more chance and then I'm coming for you."

  Before Pi could say anything, Raziyah's form shifted. It was like one of those videos that morphs one person into another, except this was real. Pi understood why Raziyah knew so much about doppelganger physiology. Raziyah was really Priyanka Sai, patron of the Academy of the Subtle Arts. And Pi was so, so utterly screwed.

  "Face a patron of the deadliest hall as a second-year initiate? Sure, why not," said Pi to herself as a pep talk.

  "I'm very sorry about this. I truly am," said Priyanka, producing twin blades in her fists. "Three. Two. One."

  Pi raised her arm to launch the seeds when Priyanka blurred forward, almost too fast for the eye to see, almost too fast for thought. Options were limited at that point. Pi could almost feel the blades enter her chest, and knowing that, did the only thing she could. She exploded the seeds. All of them.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Grat was waiting for them when Hannah blew the door down. He looked like he'd woken from an all-night bender. Something was wrong with his wings. They'd been leathery and bat-like last time and this time they were more feathery.

  To Hannah's credit, she was not deterred. Years of roller derby had taught her how to hit. Grat didn't seem to understand. Maybe he was expecting her to pull up.

  She dropped a shoulder into his gut, throwing him across the room into the drywall. A chandelier in the entryway rattled from the impact.

  A cheer lifted to Aurie's lips. "Go Hannah!"

  Aurie ran in behind her.

  Hannah threw a pair of manacles at the fallen demon. She spelled them onto his arms, clicking them into place. He lay on a broken vase.

  "Got 'em!" yelled Hannah.

  The demon clapped his hands together like a magician signaling a magic trick and the manacles fell off. Then Grat reached out like he was plucking something from Hannah's eyes, and the big girl went limp.

  Aurie threw a force bolt, but Grat knocked it away. He'd used the Five Elements gestures, rather than summoning the energy elementally. If Grat was a demon then she was a talking goat. He was most likely human.

  They dueled for a minute. Fire. Water. Elemental twists. Rock. Air-knife. Spirit-blast. She hit him hard, but he was quicker. He had fingers like a concert pianist.

  They were at an impasse. Her raw skill versus his virtuosity. The house had taken a beating. The walls were blackened, steaming from being caught on fire then doused with waters from the underworld. Tiny air elementals swirled above their heads creating smoke vortexes, only to pop like bubbles at the next pass.

  When Hannah grabbed her arm, interrupting her timing, the demon's force blast threw her into the wall. A knifelike ache formed in her side. She'd broken a rib.

  Hannah loomed over her, the vacant mask of a waker on her face. An ear-rattling explosion in the backyard broke the dining room windows. The demon Grat moved behind Hannah.

  He tried the same trick with the hand gesture towards her face. For a moment, Aurie felt a little sleepy and thought she heard voices whispering in her head, but they were distant enough she could ignore him.

  He's trying to hypnotize me, she realized. And with that the rest of the pieces fell into place. The wakers. The reason Grat had walked out of the salt circle. Maybe even why the Enochian District was important.

  "You're Frank Orpheum," she said, stopping him in his tracks.

  She'd never dispelled an illusion before, but she had an idea, based on mendancy. They were first cousins, magically speaking. It was like knowing the exact thread to pull that would unravel a hastily made sweater.

  The illusion fell away, revealing an older man in his rumpled bed clothes. She saw the resemblance to the Frank Orpheum she'd seen on TV shows or on the movies, but this one looked like a carved wooden version that had been left out in the sun too long.

  He wasn't even that attractive. He had a thin mustache and a weaselly face. She could almost imagine him pressing his face against a window, peeping on other people's lives.

  The disgust that reflected from her face enraged him. With a simple hand wave, he brought back a more handsome version of himself, the one she'd seen in the theater. He looked ready to strangle her.

  This little distraction gave Aurie a chance to work a second spell. With a word, the anchor on the chandelier weakened. Aurie pulled it from the ceiling. Frank Orpheum dove out of the way before it crushed him.

  Aurie climbed to her feet, grimacing with the pain in her side. She'd made it onto the first stair when a gut-punching explosion rocked the back of the house, blowing glass throughout the levels. Aurie hoped her sister was nowhere near that blast. Windows for a block had shattered. The back door had been knocked off its hinges. She ran up the stairs, taking two steps, then stopping for air. It hurt so much to breathe.

  The streets were filled with hundreds of wakers. She knew what they were now. Frank Orpheum had hypnotized them like he had that stadium full of people a bunch of years ago as a stunt. He'd made them into zombies. It explained why the streets of the district hadn't looked totally deserted, why the glass in front of her clinic had been cleaned up. They probably came and went during the night, and didn't stir during the day.

  She also knew what she'd seen on the first floor last time, and had gotten a brief glimpse of again today. Orpheum had access to the Garden Network in the house.

  Shit, she thought, Echo is out front with the wakers. There was nothing she could do about it now. She needed to get herself and the others out of here. They were completely outmatched against a patron of the halls.

  Aurie ascended the second flight, reaching the third floor, and Hannah appeared. At first she thought Hannah had shaken the hypnotism, until she charged Aurie.

  "Slick," she said, convincing the floor that it was made of grease, and stepped out of the way.

  Hannah careened towards the window. Too fast. Her friend went through it. Limping after, she found Hannah lying on the roof of the two-story building next door.

  A wailing cry came from the front. The wakers had captured Echo and like a group of ants, carried him towards the house. Where were the others? Rigel, Raziyah, and her sister? They should have entered the house by now.

  Aurie stuck her head out the shattered window, boots crunching on broken glass, and spied a motionless figure lying in a small crater. It was her sister.

  "No!"

  Awoken faez swirled around in her in a rage. The broken bones in her side knitted themselves with a thought. She would not be stopped. Frank Orpheum would pay for this. Pi was everything to her, the only thing in the world.

  Aurie was on her way down the second flight when she saw someone coming up. At first she thought it was a waker. Then she saw the familiar face minus her glasses. Raziyah looked like she'd been th
rough a war zone. Her right eye was swollen, lip blooded, and she had a limp. It looked like she'd survived the explosion that had killed her sister. Raziyah looked on the verge of tears.

  "Aurie," she said, her face breaking in a way that told Aurie to fear the worst.

  Aurie hesitated. How had Raz gotten past Orpheum? She disbelieved any illusions, and her friend remained. It wasn't a trick.

  "Where's Orpheum?" she asked, trembling.

  "I didn't see him," said Raziyah. "But your sister, I'm sorry. She's..."

  Raziyah held out her arms. The whole world shifted around Aurie, and she accepted the embrace rather than collapse on her knees. If she hadn't seen Frank Orpheum, then maybe he'd fled through the Garden Network portal, and there was nothing she could do now.

  The next question never made it to her lips. The blade went into her chest, piercing her heart with a cold efficiency. The pain was surprising. It was like her soul had been dunked in ice.

  Raziyah had an expression of sorrow, which only confused Aurie further until she saw the blade slip out of her chest, covered in rich, dark blood.

  The form of Raziyah shifted into Priyanka Sai. She was a doppelganger. There had been no illusion to dispel.

  Words failed, swept away by a river of darkness that rose up. Faez dissipated like a dream dispelled by reality. This is how it ends? Aurie clutched at Priyanka, who gently set her against the wall. A gurgle formed in her throat, followed by a bubble of blood on her lips. Then cold came, death unending, until she was no more.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  The explosion had shattered every window within a block. Zayn looked down upon the fallen figure, knowing without a doubt that she was dead. The other one, his patron, didn't move for a few moments either.

  Zayn had mixed emotions as he waited. If Priyanka was dead, then he was free, but would never be able to practice his magic again. On the other hand, if she wasn't, then almost nothing had changed for him.

  The dark haired woman stirred. Zayn considered slipping down there and putting a dagger into her back while she was disoriented, but decided against it. For one, even in her weakened state, Priyanka could still take him, and two, he wasn't about to murder someone in cold blood, even if that's what he'd been trained to do.