Blade of Dream, page 35
She’d just finished a bowl of beef dumpling soup when her host arrived. At first, Elaine was pleased for the company, anticipating another report from the sunlit world. Instead, Aunt Thorn tossed her a bundle of cloth and leather.
“Time to get presentable,” Aunt Thorn said.
The bundle resolved into a pair of leather-and-canvas trousers, a thick shirt, boots, and a belt with a thin steel dagger in a cheap sheath. Elaine’s first thought was that someone was coming, and she was being hidden in among the toughs and hired knives who peopled the corridors.
“It’s been strange,” the criminal prince of Kithamar said. “I trust you’ll remember me kindly when you’re back sleeping on silk.”
“You’re sending me out?” Elaine said. “I thought it would be when I asked.”
“You or him,” Aunt Thorn said. “Well, it’s him.”
“Garreth?”
“And we’ll call it his honor guard. Get dressed. This is all going to go better if you look like you’re nearly one of mine.”
She almost asked what would go better, but she was already stripping off her sleeping shift and pulling on the new clothes. Garreth was here. He’d learned something about the killers. Or about why the killers had let her go. Or anything, really, because he was here, and knowing it made her want to go up to the open air more than anything ever had. She told herself that the trembling, vibrant joy in her body was only excitement at the report he was bringing her, and even she wasn’t convinced. Garreth was here, and even if everything wasn’t all right, it was better. It would be better.
The path through the dim brick hallways was shorter than she’d expected. All the uncountable hours she’d been underground, the way up had been less than two minutes away. Aunt Thorn preceded her up stone steps worn smooth by generations of boots, down a short corridor, and to a wooden doorway that a huge, scar-pocked man with an uneasy expression pulled open for them.
The light blinded. Elaine stumbled, but Aunt Thorn caught her elbow and kept her steady. The twinge at her collarbone was the faintest echo of what the wound had been. As her eyes adapted to the brightness, men were murmuring. A voice she didn’t recognize muttered an obscenity with an awe that made it sound like prayer.
More slowly than she liked, shapes began to form. A space of relative darkness before her became a wooden wall. The unbearable white above her took on the dirty blue of a hazy sky. Men in the blue of the city guard coalesced out of light into shape and form and solidity. There had to be a dozen of them, and Garreth was at the front beside a wide-bodied man with the oversized silver badge of office that meant he was captain of a barracks. She’d met him before. Senit, she thought, and then Garreth took a step toward her. Moving into his arms was as effortless as falling. Any thought of discretion or station or the avoidance of gossip was blown away in the wind that washed through the alleyway. She put her head in the curve of his shoulder and his neck and breathed him like he was perfume.
“I missed you,” he murmured. “I was so worried she wouldn’t really let you go.”
Behind Elaine, Aunt Thorn chuckled. “I believe in following rules.”
“You’d say that even if you didn’t,” the captain said, the buzz of violence in his tone. “Nothing helps a liar like a reputation for speaking truth.”
The tension in the air plucked at Elaine, and she stepped back from Garreth. The guardsmen were all still and ready for violence. At the other end of the alley a handful of solid, angry-looking Inlisc men watched the proceedings with swords in their fists. Aunt Thorn stood in the door to her private world, smiling and apparently at ease, but her casualness raised more alarms than all the high-strung men put together.
Elaine stepped between the captain and Aunt Thorn like she was taking a stage. “Captain. What’s going on here?”
“Nothing good,” the big man said.
A familiar young bluecloak cleared his throat, made a little bow in Elaine’s direction. “Forgive me, but before you were attacked at House Left, by any chance did you mention Garreth to anyone by name? Just his first name? Not his family?”
“This isn’t the time, Maur,” the captain said, but Garreth caught her gaze and nodded.
“I…” She pressed her hands to her head. The wind muttered and hissed. “I think my cousin? Andomaka?”
“Andomaka Chaalat,” the one called Maur said. “Next in succession. This is a coup.”
“Yes, you’re very fucking clever,” the captain said. “We’re all impressed. Now shut the fuck up. Miss, what you need to do right now is make your way over to me and mine.” He locked eyes with Aunt Thorn. “And no one so much as blinks until she does.”
Aunt Thorn sighed and crossed her arms. “If I wanted her dead, she’d be dead.”
Elaine took a reflexive step, then stopped. “What’s a coup? What’s going on?”
“We’re not sure,” Garreth said. “There’s a fire. Maybe the palace, maybe Green Hill. But your cousin was the one who wanted you dead.”
Elaine felt herself thinking without being sure what she was thinking. It was like hearing a fire in the next room, feeling its heat against the door. The back of her mind was churning, and she wasn’t sure why. Not at first.
“The thread of Kithamar will not sever.”
“I don’t know what that means,” Garreth said.
“Miss,” the captain said through gritted teeth. “If this is what it seems, you’re in danger. We need to get you someplace a thousand times safer than where you are right now. Just please step over to me.”
She turned almost against her will. The scarred woman with the white eye was looking at her with something like compassion. Elaine had the sudden, powerful memory of falling into the river, fighting to get back to the surface before her air ran out. She was aware that this moment was as dangerous as that had been. She turned back to the guard captain. “Your duty isn’t to protect me, it’s to protect the city. Right now, the city is my father. We’re going to the palace.”
“Fine, good,” he said. “Come, then. We’ll get carriages. Horses. Be on our way, just come with me.”
“Crowded streets and bridges,” Aunt Thorn said. “Crawling up Oldgate like a spider. You won’t be there before dark.”
“Stay the fuck out of this, you,” the captain snapped, but Aunt Thorn was smiling now. Elaine turned to face the woman and the doorway that still hadn’t closed. Garreth was a warmth at Elaine’s side, and she was glad to feel him there.
“There are other roads,” Aunt Thorn said. “I can’t go with you. I’m yoked to a different plow. But I can open a way, if you’re brave enough.”
The woman stepped to the left. The wooden door stood open, and the darkness beyond it seemed deeper than when Elaine had walked out of it.
“That is a fucking trap,” the guard captain said. “Miss, you need to come back away from her and that place. You were lucky to get out once. You won’t get out again.”
The bluecloaks shifted, spreading in the alley like a cat pulling into a crouch. At the far end of the alleyway, the Inlisc men paced but they didn’t come closer. Not yet. The promise of violence filled the wild air like smoke.
When Aunt Thorn spoke again, her good eye was fixed on Elaine, but her words were for the captain. “Hear me on this, Divol. We aren’t allies and never will be, but today, your enemy is the same as mine. I can’t promise you and yours will live to see morning, but I give you my word that I won’t be the one who kills you.”
“Go piss up a rope,” the captain replied.
Elaine turned to Garreth, but not, she realized, for an answer. She knew in her bones that this moment was hers and hers alone. All he could be for her was a place that didn’t pull her, a garden without wind. His eyes were soft and as lost as she was. He looked older than he had that first night. Or no. That wasn’t right. He looked vulnerable and distressed. He looked to her how she must have looked to him with the river still in her hair and her sandals drowned and gone. He hauled in a great breath, about to speak, and she knew that if he told her what to do—if he commanded her—something precious would break.
“What should I do?” he asked, and the storm at the back of her mind settled.
“Come to me,” she said. “I’ll see you safe.”
Elaine ab-Deniya Nycis a Sal walked to Aunt Thorn, chin high and shoulders relaxed. The older woman’s smile could have meant anything. “Free passage for me and mine to the palace. I have your word?”
“Yes,” Aunt Thorn said.
“Done. Captain! Bring your men.” She stepped forward into the darkness without waiting to see if her command was followed. Erja was waiting in the corridor with a hooded lantern and an expression of surprise. The footsteps that came behind her were Garreth’s. She knew them without looking back.
“This way, then,” Erja said, but Elaine lifted a finger, waited. More footsteps came. Boots tramping up behind her and the tapping of scabbards against legs. The guard. Elaine nodded, and Erja turned, lifting the lantern, and led them forward and down. The brickwork walls broadened. They passed decorated niches that Elaine recognized as arrow-slits. After the wind-battered air above, the underground felt unnaturally still. Maybe it was.
They passed down a ramp as wide as a street, past dark galleries and halls. Inlisc faces watched them from the shadows, impassive or surprised or angry. Like a dark city underground, this inverted Kithamar accepted them. The guard captain was murmuring something under his breath, a single phrase repeated over and over. She thought it was I fucking knew it but she wasn’t sure what he meant. The walls changed from brick to stacked stone and old timber. The air grew wetter, thicker. The smell of the river washed over them as Erja took them forward.
The passage opened into a wide room, tall as a warehouse, where a huge wheel turned and creaked, driven by a thick belt of what looked like woven leather that entered from and disappeared into a wide black tunnel. Five people—three men, two women, all of them round-faced and curly-haired Inlisc—were dragging a wide, low sledge with wheels on its runners to the mouth of the tunnel.
“Get on,” Erja said.
“What is this?” the smaller guardsman—Maur—asked in wonder and fear.
“The king of all smugglers’ tunnels,” the captain answered.
“Get on it or walk the whole way under the river,” Erja said. “The sledge won’t come back soon.” Someone echoed under the river in a voice of regret.
Elaine stepped onto the sledge. It was made of wide oak planks, aged almost black with pale scrapes and scars that exposed new wood. The guards clambered up beside her like little boys going on a raft for the first time.
Erja handed the lantern to Elaine. “There’ll be someone on the far side to take you to the stairs. Don’t run up. It’s a long climb and few enough places to rest. But they’ll get you where you need to be.”
“Thank you,” Elaine said. “For everything.”
“Pay me back,” the Inlisc woman said. “Win.”
The last of the guards took his place at the rear of the sledge. When Elaine held up the lantern, light spilled down into the tunnel before her and failed into darkness. Garreth put a hand on the sledge’s side to steady himself.
The guard captain loomed up on Elaine’s other side. “I’ll be back here one day. I will clean all of this out. You watch me.”
“Let’s make it through today first,” Elaine said.
The scowl faltered and something like a smile but without the pleasure took its place, however briefly. “You make a fair point.”
“Hold steady!” one of the Inlisc men shouted. “It’s a hard start. Might you should sit down so you don’t fall off.”
Behind her, the guards crouched on the dark oak. She held the front of the sledge in one hand and the lantern in the other as Aunt Thorn’s people took leads from the front of the sledge to the belt, a huge iron hook wider than a man’s shoulders at the end. With the dexterity of long practice, they fastened the hook to the moving belt, and the sledge bucked under her. The rooms and Erja and the eastern half of Kithamar fell behind her like she was being pulled by a team of horses at full gallop. The wheels beneath her juddered and clacked. The speed was a wind in her hair. The tunnel fell past her, stone and wood with strange arches of blue and jade that they passed under too quickly for her to make sense of.
And under the rattling of the wheels and the creaking of the belt, a deeper, softer sound filled the air like a god exhaling forever. Above her, the Khahon ran in its bed, vast and heavy as a city. Garreth was looking up at the ceiling as it sped by. The dread in his eyes echoed her own.
“What do you think happens if this starts leaking?” he asked.
“Nothing good,” she said.
“Yeah, that sounds right.”
Elaine let go of the sledge, trusting to her balance, and shifted the lantern to her left hand. She found Garreth’s fingers with her own, and like the figurehead at the prow of a ship, they stood together and sailed into darkness.
The Daris Brotherhood burned.
Public temple and private, halls, cells, storerooms, stables. All of it in flames. The reek of smoke filled the air of Green Hill, Palace Hill, and Stonemarket. The sunlight was ruddy with it. Lines of men and women hauled water from the canal to sluice the neighboring buildings in hopes that the fire might not spread.
The beast that called itself the thread of Kithamar walked in the flesh it had taken from Andomaka Chaalat. It felt the tightness in the woman’s belly, the nausea of fear, slightly different in every body it had occupied. It held its head high to disguise its fright and balled handfuls of its robe in fists at its sides to keep the cloth from billowing. Its belt—and more to the point its blade—was gone.
There were half a dozen great compounds that the different religious brotherhoods kept, but Daris had been its home and shelter, the sanctuary to which it could run if anything went wrong at the palace. Something had gone very wrong at the palace, and the brotherhood, and now in the street where its enemies had found it, stolen from it, and made it vulnerable again in ways it hadn’t anticipated.
Had it been arrogant? Had the flesh of the secret child it had used as refuge poisoned it with the risk-blindness of youth? Had Andomaka Chaalat left behind her own prejudices and certainties along with her skin and blood? It wanted to believe that the fault was its own, because then it would be in its power to correct.
“My lady,” the head cook of the kitchens said with surprise in his voice.
“Lemel Tarrit,” the thread of Kithamar said. It had known him since he was a child washing plates. This was the third pair of eyes it had looked on him with. “I’m sorry to intrude, but I was hoping to find my servant Tregarro? Have you seen him?”
“I’m sorry. No, my lady. We don’t have many people here. I sent them all out to the fire. Are you all right? I could make you a cup of tea. Something soothing.”
It smiled gently and shook its pale head. Tregarro was too good an assassin to be seen making his approach. He had been Andomaka’s best ally and servant, but it had transformed him into Byrn a Sal’s death. It wanted him back, wanted someone who understood the situation at its side. But Tregarro was an arrow loosed. It couldn’t call him back.
“I can only hope he escaped the fire,” it said, knowing already that he had. If he wasn’t in the palace at that moment, it was because he’d already put his plan in motion and fled. The death of the prince. Lemel touched the thread’s arm, offering comfort. It was both a gentle, human moment and an affront. The thread of Kithamar smiled gently with Andomaka’s lips and headed into the halls and galleries it had built over centuries. Like a fish swimming against the stream, it moved in as the guards and servants and courtiers streamed out to battle the fire. The stink of smoke reached into the dim, thick-walled corridors that had once been its fortress. That still were. That would be again.
Kithamar slipped through close, dark halls, down a spiral stair, and through a doorway that hadn’t been opened in a generation to the private chapel where Daos a Sal had once communed with the spirits. It walked to the silver altar, tarnished now almost to blackness, sat, and swung its legs up. Fear made it difficult to think, but it had to think. It had to plan.
The blade was gone, and with it the ritual that let it slip from the far side of death into the rich saltwater of living flesh. If it died now, who would there be to save it? Its enemies were everywhere. If it stumbled again, the great long game would be ended. It pushed the thought away. This was no time to dwell on failure.
There were two heartbeats that kept it from its place at the head of the city. The false-blood prince and his daughter. Byrn a Sal was dead, or as good as. Elaine a Sal was in hiding. So that was its focus now. Finding the girl and killing her… But the blade was gone. It looked up into the thickness of cobwebs and dust and remembered when the stones there had been clean. It felt the deep roots and cold of the palace like it was feeling its own flesh. It reached for a calm, for an option, for a way to be safe and whole again. A way to keep eating all that it needed to eat. Not an end to hunger, but the permanent cultivation of longing.
There had been a first time. A time before blade and blood and water when—small and weak as a tadpole—it had first found its way into the living flesh of the city. It was so long ago, and it had been so young, so much less than it had since become, it was easy to forget.
So there was another way. Even if Andomaka was killed. Even if Elaine a Sal took her dead father’s place, there was a way. It would mean losing a great deal—memory and power and the deep history. To some degree, even its sense of itself. It would be a second first time, a refounding of the city within itself. Beginning again where it had started so many generations before with a new bloodline to rule the city for another thousand years.
