“We don’t have illegitimate children,” said Romeo. “Keeps things simpler. Besides, isn’t your family supposed to want you whether you earn it or not?”
“What would you know?” Paris demanded, not liking how gentle Romeo’s voice had gotten.
“Because that’s how Makari was with me,” said Romeo, and Paris could see the man’s face clear as daylight as he felt Romeo’s overwhelming rush of affection. “He didn’t always have time—he was only my tutor, he couldn’t always be attending to me—but when he did, he was . . . well.” Romeo rubbed at the back of his neck. “Also I have read poems, and it’s very clear. If your family didn’t want you, they aren’t worth poetry and therefore aren’t worth worrying over. Right?”
But they were worth worrying over. Paris didn’t know what sort of irresponsible butterfly soul Romeo might have, that he could just forget his family didn’t want him, but Paris wasn’t—couldn’t—did not have it in him to ignore and despise the family that birthed him.
“I could write a poem for you,” said Romeo. “To make it clear.”
“That wouldn’t help,” Paris said stiffly, wondering how this conversation had gotten out of control.
“A poem of comfort.”
“No.” Paris desperately wished that he had gotten stuck in this situation with somebody who was . . . anyone but Romeo. “Look, when we meet Vai, just . . . let me do the talking.”
There was one god face in the Lower City: Xinaad, the god of luck and lies. His upside-down features protruded out of a giant mound of red-gold rock that rose up in the middle of the Lower City, and around him was a round courtyard with several old fountains. As with most open places in the city, scrawny, ragged cats swarmed the courtyard, sunning themselves and scuffling with each other.
Romeo marched forward to one of the nearby buildings and rapped on the door. A hulking, one-eyed man opened it and gave them an absent-minded glower.
“We’re here for the duel,” said Romeo.
“Don’t know of any duels,” said the man.
Romeo drew a breath, probably about to make an attempt at lying their way in. Before he could do anything irreparable, Paris stepped in front of him and said, “Look, I don’t know whatever ridiculous code you people may use. We’re here to see the King of Cats. It’s important.”
There was a moment where the man just stared at him and Paris felt horribly certain that they were about to get laughed at and thrown out on the street.
Then the man pulled the door wider and said, “Inside.”
They stepped inside the house and promptly discovered the two other men waiting, who quickly and efficiently searched them and confiscated Romeo’s sword, then grabbed them quite tightly by the arms and marched them down into the house’s cellar.
The cellar had a door.
The door went down into a passage, which opened out into an underground hall that was made of the space between the foundations of several old buildings—each of the five uneven walls was a different style of stonework. On one of the walls, somebody had carved a rough copy of Xinaad’s face from outside.
And dueling right beneath Xinaad’s nose was Vai. He was fighting again with the short sticks, this time against a man wielding a long staff. And this time he was using no elaborate tricks; their weapons clattered against each other as they struck and parried.
The staff’s reach should have given the challenger an advantage. But Vai moved like a cracking whip, fast and flexible and strong. As Romeo and Paris watched, the challenger’s staff whirled toward his head. Vai dropped to the ground, and his arm lashed out, slamming one of his sticks into the man’s knee. There was a sharp crack of breaking bone; the man howled and fell.
Vai stood up, grinning wildly. “Anyone else?” he called.
This was probably not going to end well, but they had come too far to back out. Also, they were being held by a pair of men with grips like steel, so they really couldn’t back out.
“We need to talk,” said Paris.
Vai’s smile disappeared. “I told you to go home.”
“We have no home,” Romeo declared, sounding like he was delivering the start of a poem.
Paris cut him off before he could say anything else. “We’re not working for Lord Catresou,” he said. “We’re trying to stop him. We know that Tybalt was the previous King of Cats. Do you know anything about what else he was doing down here?”
“Yes, boy with a Catresou accent, I’m clearly going to believe you on that,” said Vai. “Run along now.”
“No,” said Paris. “You have to help us.”
“You’re either working for your family, in which case you’re lucky I’m not breaking your bones, or you’re not, in which case you’re a naive little boy who’s going to get killed,” said Vai. “Whichever it is, I have nothing to say to you.”
“I’m not Catresou,” said Romeo. “And they want to destroy both of us.”
Vai gave him a skeptical look.
“We need your help,” said Romeo, “so we can avenge a noble lady they have wronged most terribly.”
That appeal was not going to work. Paris didn’t think Vai was entirely without honor—he had saved Paris, after all, when he didn’t have to—but he clearly wasn’t going to help them just because Romeo was very, very earnest and almost speaking in verse.
He remembered how Vai had faced down the other gang in the streets and offered them a wager.
Paris stepped between Romeo and Vai. “I’ll fight you for answers,” he said.
Vai’s narrow eyebrows went up a fraction. “Will you, now?”
“Give me a sword,” said Paris, “and I’ll fight you. If I land a hit, you have to give us answers.”
Do you think you can? Romeo asked silently.
Probably, said Paris. Vai was clever and an amazing fighter, but he couldn’t possibly have had training with a sword. That was a noble’s weapon.
Vai’s grin was like a razor. “Andrvad!” he called out. “Two swords!”
It wasn’t a good sign that one of Vai’s men had two swords on hand. When Vai drew one of them with an easy, fluid grace, Paris felt the familiar, nauseating certainty that he was about to fail humiliatingly.
Are you sure? said Romeo.
You’re not helping, said Paris. It didn’t matter how good Vai was. Paris had been useless at everything else so far; he was going to succeed at this. No matter what it took.
“I promise not to throw things at you,” said Vai.
“Do you do that often?” asked Paris.
“It’s how I won the title. Threw my stick at his head and knocked him out. Fastest victory on record.”
Paris suddenly remembered two months ago, when Tybalt had disappeared for a week and everybody said he had been injured tangling with brigands in the Lower City. He had heard gossip about how Paris must be hoping he won’t get better, but he’d known that Tybalt would recover. And he did.
And then he died in a duel. As Paris now might.
“I’ll call out the start,” said Romeo. “Three. Two. One.”
Vai struck like the wind. Paris had barely realized that he was moving, and then the point of his sword had scraped his arm.
“I win,” said Vai, turning away. “Good-bye.”
“Wait!” said Paris. “That—that wasn’t the bargain.”
“Oh?” Vai looked back.
“It was if I scored a point, you answered our questions,” said Paris. “Nobody said anything about when you scored a point.”
Vai’s grin was absolutely delighted. “Keep thinking that way, and you’ll almost be worthy of this court.” He fell back into dueling stance. “Come at me, then.”
In the next flurry, Paris lasted a bit longer. But then he tried to duck away from the sword and ended up landing on his back. A moment later the sword point was just above his nose, with Vai looking down at him.
“Yield,” said Vai, sounding positively friendly.
“No,” Paris said, and rolled to the
side.
He was growing fairly sure that Vai didn’t want to kill or maim him, and that meant all Vai could do was injure or humiliate him. Paris had been humiliated by the best, and he didn’t mind bleeding. Not if it meant he could avenge Juliet and stop the necromancers.
In the next round, he didn’t bother trying to parry; he lunged at Vai without any sort of finesse, hoping that it would at least be unexpected. All he got was a really nasty scrape along his left shoulder.
The next time he tried to attack, Vai cartwheeled away and then kicked the sword out of his hand. Doggedly, Paris picked the sword back up and attacked again. And again. And again.
“Yield,” Vai said each time, and each time Paris said, “No.”
He was being played with. He was being shown his place. He was being publicly humiliated, but Paris was used to that, and he wasn’t going to stop for anything except death or maiming.
Sooner or later, Vai was going to realize that, and then he would have to make a choice.
There was sweat running into his eyes; his breath was coming in ragged gasps. He’d gotten two more cuts.
“Yield,” said Vai, and he wasn’t smirking now.
“No,” said Paris.
“That’s enough,” said Romeo, and wrenched the sword out of his hand.
“No,” Paris gasped, but Romeo ignored him and attacked.
Suddenly the game was a duel. The swords flashed and clattered, as Romeo drove Vai back with an easy, relentless grace. Paris stared at him, realizing he had completely forgotten that this boy defeated Tybalt Catresou.
It didn’t take him long to defeat Vai. A few moments later he had Vai backed against the wall with the sword at this throat.
“Yield,” Romeo said calmly.
Vai smiled over the sword point and said, “You’re very impressive. But not as much as your friend.”
Then he kicked Romeo in the stomach. Romeo doubled over, and Paris gasped as he felt a faint echo of the breathless pain.
He still managed to call out, “He scored a point. Will you answer his question?”
Vai’s smile was almost fond. “You really don’t know how to quit, do you?”
“No,” said Paris. “Do I need to fight you again?”
Before Vai could reply, Paris heard the door behind him slam. There were audible gasps. And then someone called out, “I challenge the King of Cats!”
Paris had heard the voice before, but for a moment he didn’t recognize it. He was too dazed by the sudden wave of overpowering dread that flowed over him from Romeo’s mind.
And then he looked.
It was Tybalt.
He was several inches taller than Paris, with broad shoulders and dark red hair. He moved with an easy, fluid confidence as he strode down the steps into the main part of the hall; his unmasked face was set and grim.
He was dead. Paris had seen his embalmed body, and he felt sick as Tybalt walked toward them, moving as naturally as if his heart and brain and stomach had not been scooped out of his body and put in jars.
And he was alive. He was nothing like the revenant they had seen yesterday. This was not his dead body, writhing back to a semblance of life as all corpses did if they were not burned first. This was Tybalt himself, summoned back into a body that had been dead and cold. This was necromancy.
Everyone in the room had gone silent, staring. But nobody was screaming. Nobody was running from Tybalt or trying to hack him to pieces. As Tybalt strode toward them, his boots echoing against the stone, Paris realized: nobody knew the previous King of Cats had been Tybalt Catresou. They knew that the previous king had lost his place to Vai. But they didn’t know he was the Catresou boy who had died a few days ago.
Master Trelouno and Lord Catresou had lamented that they could resurrect Tybalt, but they couldn’t use him, because everyone knew he was dead. Evidently, they had found the loophole.
“Lock the doors,” Vai called out, and there was no fear in his voice, but he was watching Tybalt with an absolute attention. “It’s another dead one.”
Of course. Vai had known Tybalt’s name. He knew what they were facing.
The men scrambled to obey, but they weren’t panicking, and Paris realized that Vai had said another. They had faced this kind of threat before.
“You have defied my masters,” Tybalt said flatly, looking straight at Vai. “For that offense, you will die. But I came for these two.” He turned toward Paris and Romeo. “That girl did not lie.”
For one nightmarish moment, Paris thought that Tybalt had been talking to Juliet’s ghost in the land of the dead. Then he remembered the girl from the day before, saying, I’ll probably do my best to make trouble for him. She must have gone to Lord Catresou and told him what she knew about Romeo.
“What happened to her?” he asked.
The girl hadn’t minded necromancy, if it would bring back the ones she loved. But Paris couldn’t imagine she would like to see Tybalt like this.
“When she had told us where you were, she was no more use to us,” said Tybalt, his voice dry, disinterested, and Paris shivered. “You will die now.”
“Wait!” said Romeo. “Tybalt, you can’t do this—you loved Juliet, didn’t you? Lord Catresou had her killed.”
Tybalt looked at him as if he were an insect and said, “So?”
Paris finally found his voice. “You had a duty to her,” he said. “You were the best of us. I don’t care if you’ve died, that’s no excuse.”
He only realized after he had said the words that he had moved to stand beside Romeo, even though he didn’t have a sword. Though it probably didn’t matter, because there was no way Paris could ever beat him in a fight.
“My duty is to my master,” said Tybalt, and though Paris had hardly known him before, he could tell there was something wrong about his voice.
Tybalt moved. He was fast, and Paris would have been slashed open and bleeding to death an instant later except that Romeo shoved him to the side. They both went tumbling to the ground, as Paris heard the clatter of steel on steel that meant Vai had started fighting Tybalt.
“Don’t hurt him!” Romeo yelled, sitting up.
“He’s already dead!” Vai shouted back. His next stroke sliced across Tybalt’s cheek. For just an instant, as the blood welled up from the cut, it was bright red. Then as it dripped, it turned black as ink.
Black blood. The sign of the living dead.
Two other men lunged forward with swords, and Paris knew that Tybalt was a master swordsman, but the magic that brought him back must have changed him. No normal person could dodge and parry that fast against three opponents at once.
Tybalt snarled and lunged, and this time he knocked the sword out of Vai’s hand.
Paris didn’t think. He rolled, flinging out his legs to catch Tybalt’s ankles and trip him.
Tybalt went down, and in a heartbeat Vai was on top of him and had gripped his head—
And with a sharp crack, snapped his neck.
Paris flinched. Beside him, Romeo had gone very still.
Vai looked at them. “Thank you,” he said.
Paris swallowed. Tybalt had been raised from the dead by a necromancer. Paris had helped kill him again.
“It was nothing,” he managed.
“I think we need to talk,” said Vai.
21
THE REVENANTS SWARMING FROM EVERY corner of the Sunken Library didn’t scream or howl as they closed in, ready to kill. They only hissed: a dry, whispering chorus from every direction.
Runajo’s hands shook as she drew the knife.
Then Juliet yelled as she attacked. The next moment, Runajo had slashed her palm back open and pressed it to the door. She burrowed her mind through the locks, layer after layer. The spells were archaic; they felt old and dusty and full of hidden razors, but it didn’t matter if she sliced her mind open on them, she had to get the door open. She had to get them out of here.
She heard Juliet’s harsh gasps as she attacked the revenants,
the pounding of her feet against the floor as she jumped and dodged, the thumps of limbs and heads falling to the ground.
The endless, hungry hissing of the revenants.
There were so many.
Then Runajo found the turn of the lock, and she felt the spells on the door unraveling, and it swung open.
Juliet! she called, and a moment later Juliet came charging down the hall. She grabbed Runajo without losing speed and shoved her through the doorway, then whirled to slice and stab at the two revenants that had followed.
Now, said Runajo, and Juliet leaped inside just as the door slammed shut, chopping off one writhing revenant hand.
Gasping for breath, they turned around.
They were in a round, domed room. The walls and ceiling were covered in woven strips of brass, so that every surface glittered. There were no bookshelves, but there were rows of low racks full of softly glowing white cylinders with brass on either end.
She had read the descriptions. This was the heart of the Sunken Library.
And there were no revenants inside. Until they opened the door again, they were safe.
“What is this?” asked Juliet, poking a finger at one of the cylinders.
Runajo grinned. “You’ve never seen a scroll? Since the Ruining, we’ve lost the art of making them. But in the old days, the Sisters of Thorn didn’t need paper.”
Gently, she removed a scroll from the nearest rack. It fit snugly into her hand, her fingertips curving comfortably around the rim. She said “Open,” and glowing words hovered in the air before her. It was in one of the more obscure ancient languages; she knew the alphabet, but not the words.
Juliet prowled around her in a circle, her gaze shifting suspiciously between the glowing scroll and the shadowed walls.
“And you think,” she asked, “those Sisters wrote down the knowledge you need?”
Runajo whispered “Close” to the unreadable scroll, and the glowing letters vanished. She put it back on the shelf.
“They built Viyara, and they also wrote the scrolls,” she said, running her fingertips along the cool, smooth cylinders. “So perhaps. At any rate, our odds are better taking scrolls than books. They could put five or ten of our books into a single scroll. More chance of bringing away something useful.”
Bright Smoke, Cold Fire Page 18