Blade of Dream, page 36
It wouldn’t be the full casting out that it had managed with Andomaka and Ausai and Airis and Daos. The thread would be reduced again to only a voice, an influence, a foreign impulse, but one that could whip Elaine a Sal from the inside, drive her where it needed her to go.
The plans cascaded in its mind, old memories like the glimmers of childhood recalled in great age. It would be such a loss to be so small again, such a profound setback. There were things it would need, but it could be done.
It could be done.
The thread of Kithamar rose, its route through the palace already clear in its mind. Its enemies had managed more than it had imagined they could, but there were few things as dangerous as a wounded god.
Time became very strange in the underground. The passage under the city must have taken hours, but Garreth couldn’t say how many. Two seemed as likely as four or eight or that they had fallen into the darkness in some other life and were in the eternal dark with the memory following behind them like a mirage.
The stairs rose in darkness, sometimes carved out of the native granite of the land, sometimes constructed from ancient wood. The path up followed no pattern that Garreth could understand, but wove in one direction and then another, turning sometimes in a tight rising spiral, sometimes flattening into a gently rising corridor with only five or six steps in it. It reminded him of the wandering paths worms and termites ate in old wood. The air was still and stank of mold and age. Every hundred yards or so, they passed niches in the walls with ancient iron mechanisms in them slowly bleeding into rust. Garreth couldn’t imagine their function or the history that brought them there. The lantern in Elaine’s hand threw a small bubble of light in the vast and twisting darkness. He didn’t want to think what would happen if that brightness failed.
Behind them, the guard marched, footsteps in a deep, rolling rhythm that set the pace. Maur and Kannish and his uncle Marsen. Old Boar and Frijjan Reed. Beren and Nattan Torr and men who’d expected to spend the day drilling their swordplay instead of this. No one spoke, and the weight of stone and soil around ate the echoes of their passage. Garreth felt safer with them there. As though, since none of them had refused, the thing they were doing couldn’t be as mad as it seemed.
The walk was like a forced march up the face of Oldgate, and he felt it with every step. Hard, yes, painful, yes, but not worse than the long run that Beren meted out as a punishment for sloth. Before Garreth had joined the guard, he couldn’t have done it. Maur couldn’t have. Kannish might have been able, but it would have left him spent. Now, it was a hard day with worse waiting at the end, but it wouldn’t stop them. Elaine wasn’t guard, didn’t spend her days in training. It had to be worse for her, but she didn’t slow, and he wasn’t about to suggest that she should.
The stairs turned again, this time curling up to the right in a wide, swooping spiral that evened out into a hallway. The air smelled different here. She felt it too, but only hesitated for a moment before striding forward. A wide doorway made from oiled pine loomed up on the wall. When she paused beside it, Garreth put his hands to it and pulled. The wood bent, and for a moment he thought it was locked or frozen in place by decades. Then it shifted.
Captain Senit stepped to his side, his hands beside Garreth’s. “On three,” the older man said, and counted down.
The door shrieked. The wood bit into Garreth’s fingers as it yielded, but it yielded. The room beyond it was blacker than night, and Elaine walked into it, lantern high. Garreth was carried along with the press of guards anxious not to be left in the darkness. Leather-bound chests huddled against stone walls. Low wooden shelves piled with sacks and boxes and pottery jars filled the center of the room like an abandoned store that sold curiosities and minor wonders. The guards—Maur wide-eyed among them, Kannish trying to look unimpressed at his side—walked through the room with hands on their swords. The sense of having stepped into a nightmare was clear on all their faces.
“I know where we are,” Elaine said. “This is the south side of the palace. The old armory should be right above us.”
“Kint’ll be there,” Captain Senit said.
“I can go to him,” Old Boar said. “I know enough men in the red that he’ll see me.”
“That ain’t the question,” the captain said, his eyes locked on Elaine. Her lips thinned and she looked down.
After a moment, she shook her head. “We are the only ones we trust. Us and my father. We can bring others in once we know that they’re on our side of the fight.”
“A dozen of us against the whole palace guard,” Beren said. “Doesn’t seem fair.”
“We could use blunted swords,” Frijjan Reed said.
“Cut the chatter,” the captain barked, then turned back to Elaine. “Where should we find your father?”
“I don’t know. His rooms or his study, most likely? But if he’s been attacked—”
“Marsen. You take Frijjan Reed, Beren and his crew. Find the prince’s rooms. If he’s there, his daughter sent you to protect him, and you don’t fucking leave his side until I’m there to tell you to. If that means sticking a knife in our red-cloaked brothers, try not to be the one that starts it.”
“Understood,” Marsen said. In the lantern’s weak light, his face was ashen.
“The rest of you, with me and the lady. We’ll try the study. We don’t know what we’re heading into, we don’t know who our allies are or who’s the enemy, but the goal’s easy. Find the prince. Keep him safe. And if you come across Andomaka Chaalat, take her into custody. If she fights that—”
Captain Senit paused, his mouth open, as he realized what he was about to say.
“Kill her,” Elaine finished for him.
“You heard it. Kill her,” the captain said, though he seemed less certain than when he’d started. “Miss, if you could see us as far as daylight.”
“This way,” Elaine said, turning toward the far side of the storeroom.
Garreth started after her, but Captain Senit took his arm, squeezing it hard enough to hurt. “You’re with me, Left. Either I’m about to watch somebody gut you, or we’ll be having words when this is done.”
“I did what I had to do,” Garreth said, and the captain released him with a grunt.
“You did what you picked.”
Elaine moved through the thick-walled corridors and dark, heavy rooms of the palace with a certainty born of her weeks of wandering. As they reached the open air, the reek of smoke was strong, but not choking. The flames that she’d feared didn’t flicker in the windows and doors. The fire hadn’t taken the palace, but it was nearby. The sun had turned red with it.
The shortest path to Ausai’s private study took them through a servants’ hall that the palace guard frequented. With Garreth and his two friends, the captain, and half a dozen more bluecloaks beside her, she’d look like an invading force. I am the daughter of the prince, she thought. Stand down and let us pass. She practiced until the rhythm of the words and the rhythm of her stride became one thing. Her whole self, bent in a single direction and tight as a bowstring. I am the daughter of the prince. Stand down and let us pass. She felt the exhaustion in her flesh, but at a remove. The fear and anticipation of violence lifted her up like a hot wind.
“There may be trouble ahead,” she said as they turned the last corner before the hall.
It will be all right Garreth said at the same moment the captain said Understood. She took more comfort in Garreth’s answer.
The hall was wide, low, and dark. Centuries of soot from the fire grate had stained the walls too deeply for scrubbing to wash entirely away. Heavy wooden tables and benches filled the center of the room, leaving just enough space behind them for the servants to carry in plates of food and tuns of beer and wine. They were empty. Elaine’s steps faltered.
“What is it?” Garreth asked.
“There’s always someone here,” she said. “This feels wrong.”
“Seems like luck to me,” Garreth’s friend Kannish said. She didn’t know whether the discomfort in his voice was his or something that her own ear supplied. She shuddered and pushed forward. The study was two buildings over, and up one shallow flight of stairs. They were almost on it.
But.
Motion caught her attention, and she shouted by reflex. A servant girl with a thin face and curled hair—as much Inlisc as Hansch—peeked back around the corner before coming in. Her gaze flickered around at the guards and landed on Elaine, and she bowed.
“Miss,” she said. “I’m so glad to see you back. Everyone was so worried with you gone. What can I do for you?”
“Where is everybody?”
“At the fire, miss.”
“What fire?”
The servant girl looked up in confusion. It was as if Elaine had asked whether the sky were up from here or down. “The Daris?”
“The Daris Brotherhood is burning?”
“Burnt, for the most. Caught flame earlier today. They’ve been hauling water from the canal for hours. Everyone from the palace and the compounds around it. Reyos. A Jimental. They’ve been pulling water from the canal with bucket lines. Three different ones. One of the buildings came down an hour ago, and the others… they’re gutted. I only came back because Master Allysin needed fresh cloth for one of the girls who got burned.”
“What about my father? Do you know where he is?”
“I’m sorry. I don’t.”
“Go, then,” Elaine said. “I need nothing. You should go.”
The girl bowed again, turned to leave, and then paused. “It is good to have you back, miss,” she said, then hurried away. Garreth’s eyes were wide.
“That’s hers. Andomaka Chaalat’s. Would she burn her own compound for a distraction?” he asked.
“If she did, she’s an idiot,” the captain said. “But she wouldn’t be the first idiot I’ve heard of.”
“Or else we have allies we don’t know about,” Elaine said. “It doesn’t change anything we have to do. Follow me.”
The empty passages both within the buildings and between them seemed more ominous now. A distant sound, too faint for direction, worried at her. A crackling and hissing like rats chewing through wood. Her mind kept trying to make it into the voice of the flames consuming the Daris Brotherhood or else spreading to other buildings in Green Hill or the palace, but the smoke was no thicker. There were no voices raised in alarm, just the soft, uncanny noise.
The complex iron door—Ausai’s door—stood closed. When she pushed it, it was like pressing against the wall. There was no sign that it had ever yielded to her hand, nor that it ever would again.
“We can ram it,” the captain said.
“There’s another door,” Elaine said. “I had just hoped that…”
She lost track of what she was saying, her eyes on the iron figures worked into the door. The man with the doubled swords and the wolfskin. Oumlish, his name was. His battle with the great bird, the symbol of the Inlisc warlords. The images of him standing above his own shadow-soul and at the old Hansch altar of consecration. They were scenes from the founding of the city. The birth of Kithamar, worked in iron that hadn’t rusted in centuries. Even the rising beasts and the falling angels were symbols of the turn of one age to the next that the new-made city had marked. It had all been opaque to her before. Now it was clear as good glass. The sculpture was like poetry without language, and it took her breath away.
How do you know this? she thought, rubbing unconsciously at her wrists where they itched. You didn’t know this, and now you do. How did you learn all this?
“Elaine?”
Garreth was beside her. It was such a relief to see him. But of course, he’d been with her all along. She put her back against the door and her palms against her temples. The sense of disorientation faded a little.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
“Fine. It’s that noise. It distracted me.”
He frowned. “What noise?”
“The…” She lifted a fist, like she was grinding a handful of gravel together. “You don’t hear it?”
Garreth frowned and tilted his head. “Maybe? A little.”
“I don’t hear anything,” Maur said.
The captain put a hand on her shoulder. “We need to keep moving. Tell me how to find this second door and I’ll leave you a bodyguard.”
She shrugged his hand away. The sound was louder now, and there was a rhythm in it, like waves that slowly built and receded. She had the sense of being close to something vast, like the vertigo of looking out from the top of the palace into the wide air over the city. Or up into the vastness of the sky. She swallowed.
“It’s just down the corridor here.”
The air seemed to resist her as she walked, like she was trying to make her way along the riverbed, the air around her suddenly thick as water. The men walked beside her, and she had the sense that her force was larger now. That they had been joined by someone else. When she tried to count, it was just the ones who’d been there since the captain had split the forces, but she was certain that when she didn’t count, there were more. The world seemed to have more depth than it should.
She led her uncertain host down the dark corridor to the new door, the passage that her father had called for, ready to confront the guards there, ready to pry open the lock or break the bar if she had to.
Two red-cloaked palace guards lay on the stone, their eyes focused on nothing. The door stood open, and a flickering light came from it. The noise that poured out from the study was so overwhelmingly loud she almost didn’t hear the captain speak.
“Blades at the ready, boys. Follow my lead.”
Garreth’s fist ached around the sword’s grip. Captain Senit moved first, entering the flickering hallway with his teeth bared somewhere between a threat and a grin. Garreth stayed close behind him, then Kannish and Maur and Old Boar. Elaine was someplace behind that, but all his attention slid forward into the light. The sound that Elaine had talked about was just on the edge of his hearing now. A hissing, clattering like hard rain or a pot at a boil. Something energetic and destructive.
The room they entered was in chaos. Books lay scattered and torn, ankle deep on the floor like a snowstorm made from pages. It was a small space, almost too close to swing a blade. Golden runes had been fashioned into the stone, but Garreth didn’t know what they meant. Something swirled through the space, violent as a storm, though the air was still. Two people were in the center of the room. The one standing was a pale woman in a robe tied with a length of rope instead of a belt, her face contorted with more than rage. The one on his knees before her, blood running from his mouth and eyes unfocused and failing, Halev Karsen.
“Hey!” Captain Senit barked. “Step back from that man and keep your hands empty!”
The pale woman turned, and behind her, Karsen slumped to the ground as if her attention had been the only thing supporting him. Her eyes had a flat, fish-like brightness as they clicked from one to the other of them. When she scowled, she seemed to have too many teeth. Garreth heard Maur as if he was half a mile away, whispering That was a bad idea.
Captain Senit moved toward her slowly, his sword before him. Maur and Old Boar tried to follow, and Garreth meant to go after, but the room felt as if it had tipped under them. Moving forward, even a step or two, was like climbing a steep hill. The captain slipped on the ripped pages of a book and sank to one knee, his blade waving toward the floor like it had become unbearably heavy. Behind him, Kannish paused, his chest working like a bellows, the few steps toward the pale woman a greater effort than the whole march through the buried city under Kithamar.
Elaine’s voice came from behind him, cutting through the roar like they were happening in different worlds. “Where is my father?”
No, Garreth tried to say. Don’t let it know you’re here. Run. Don’t stop running. Never stop running.
It was too late.
The weird, fish-flat eyes shifted, and the pressure pushing him back ebbed a little. Kannish sank to his knees, and the captain coughed once and deeply. When the pale woman found Elaine there among them, she smiled. It was horrible.
“What did you ask me, cousin?” Andomaka asked through her teeth.
“Where,” Elaine said, then paused for breath. “Where is my father? What did you do to him?”
The pale woman spread her hands in mock innocence. “Something’s bothering you? Please, come tell your cousin Andomaka all about it.”
“Don’t,” Garreth tried to shout, but it came out less than a murmur. The roaring, screaming, burning, chewing sound throbbed, and there were lines in the noise. Little black threads that connected the thing in the center of the room to each of them. To everything. Not a web, but the strings of a marionette that was the city and everybody in it. He felt something damp happening in his eyes, and he thought he was weeping until he touched his cheek and his fingers came away red. He heard Elaine’s footsteps moving toward him, toward the beast in its almost human body, and his sense of loss was wider than the sky and deeper.
Elaine walked past him on his right, her spine straight, her shoulders unbowed. Maur shrieked with raw effort, trying to rush ahead of her, his blade high, so that when he fell maybe it would reach the target. Andomaka Chaalat didn’t even shift her attention as Maur collapsed. He didn’t try to catch himself, and his head struck the floor with a sound like a dropped melon. A moan came from one of the men behind them, only a few steps away and farther than the city walls. The room was small, and Garreth could no more cross it than he could fly.
Elaine stood before the god-monster, her face twisted with pain. Garreth’s heart labored, ached, stung.
And another thread suddenly was. It was so small, so thin, so fragile, he almost overlooked it. Faint as a spider’s web, it ran between him and Elaine, red and pulsing gently with his heartbeat.
