The Light of All That Falls, page 36
Raeleth rubbed his face.
“I may know of one,” he finally admitted. “But it won’t exactly be easy. It involves something of a… jump.”
Davian’s heart skipped a beat. “Can you show me?”
Raeleth’s gaze slid to the sleeping forms on the other side of the fire, and he gave a long, wide yawn. “Tonight might be too soon,” he admitted wearily.
Davian thought. They didn’t need to do it tonight, but he’d been itching to take action. Plus, the work they did was dangerous: tomorrow Raeleth might be injured, or his Dark infection might return more quickly this time, sapping Davian’s Reserve even further.
He reluctantly tapped his Reserve and held up a hand that now gave off a gentle light, palm out toward Raeleth. “I can fix that. May I?”
Raeleth nodded after a pause for consideration, and Davian clasped him on the shoulder, letting Essence drain into the other man. After a few seconds Raeleth’s eyes stopped drooping and he sat up straight, breathing deeply.
“That is… remarkable,” he said softly. “I don’t feel like I need to sleep at all now.”
“It’s not a replacement for sleep, but it’s close,” explained Davian. “You should be able to nap later for only a couple of hours, and still feel as though you got a full night’s rest.”
Raeleth stood, stretching. “Good enough for me,” he said, a slight spring to his step now. He glanced again at Ana and Ched to check that they were still slumbering before motioning into the darkness. “Well. If we’re going to do this…”
Davian stood, too, feeling both more nervous and more purposeful than he had since he’d arrived.
They struck out northward, past and over and under buildings as they made their way through the messy maze of the city, picking their way adeptly around any rubble in their path. It was hard to move soundlessly, every skitter and crunch of stone feeling like it was giving away their position. Nothing stirred in the red-tinged darkness, though, and every campfire still burning that they passed revealed only people sleeping.
Raeleth led the way, pausing occasionally to get his bearings and leading them in a seemingly zigzagging pattern along smaller, narrower paths and tunnels than they would usually choose to travel. He saw Davian’s concerned glance at one point and shook his head slightly.
“I know where we are,” he assured Davian. “Some of us spent the first week here hiding out in these areas until it was either surrender or starve—that’s when I found where we’re going. The al’goriat don’t seem to bother patrolling as much around these ways, either.”
Davian accepted the statement, allowing Raeleth to lead them off in yet another new direction. If the man knew a route that avoided the creatures, it seemed wise to let him take it.
As they moved, Davian reached out for kan again, the attempt almost an absent, nervous habit now. He was so close. Every time he stretched he could feel the dark power, as if it were flowing over the very tips of his fingers. Just a little further, and he would be able to grasp it. Use it to draw in Essence once more.
They came to an abrupt stop in the shell of a hollowed-out building, and Davian abandoned his efforts, watching curiously as Raeleth started dragging aside some smaller pieces of stone that had fallen on the floor. After a moment, Davian moved to help him.
“So why are we doing this?” he asked between breaths.
“Because of… that,” Raeleth panted as he hauled aside the final chunk, indicating the space on the floor that had been cleared.
Davian squinted at the dusty surface, finally spotting the faint square outline in the grit. A trapdoor.
Raeleth fumbled around in his pockets, then produced a long, fat key. The silver glistened in the dull red light.
“Metal?” Davian gazed at the key in disbelief. “You’ve been hiding metal?” He’d only been here a week, but he knew how risky a proposition that was.
“I thought about adding it to the bucket almost every day,” said Raeleth, dusting off a section of the trapdoor to reveal the keyhole. “But… this is where I hid, that first week. Giving it up felt too much like giving up.” He gave Davian a grim smile. “Told you. All in El’s plan.”
Davian shook his head dazedly as Raeleth inserted the key, giving it a sharp twist. The lock clunked beneath the sturdy wood; Raeleth scrabbled around the edge of the trapdoor and proceeded to haul it open.
Davian and Raeleth both winced as a sharp creaking sound echoed among the buildings, and Davian held his breath. There was no response from the city, though.
Davian allowed himself to breathe again, then peered down. He could see the first few stairs vanishing quickly into the darkness, but nothing beyond that.
At Raeleth’s nod, he reluctantly sent a sliver of Essence out ahead of him and started downward.
He paused a few steps in, waiting patiently as Raeleth carefully closed the trapdoor behind him, locking it again. That was probably smart; even if someone spotted the uncovered entrance, they wouldn’t be able to open it. The wood had looked thick, too. No one scavenging for metal would risk wasting time trying to break it in.
“What is this place?” Davian asked as Raeleth pocketed the key and they began their descent, Davian’s tiny ball of Essence their only illumination now. “I assume it’s not just a cellar.”
“There’s a massive network of tunnels that run beneath the city, and this is the only way down that I’ve seen. I think they may have been mines, once.” Raeleth gave a half shrug. “I’ve come across old equipment down here, anyway. A couple of ropes. Some pickaxes I ended up turning in for the metal.”
“If they were mines, then surely there are other entrances,” Davian pointed out uneasily. “Bigger and more obvious ones than this, too.”
“There probably are. But I think those must be on the northern side.” Raeleth gestured. “You’ll see.”
They reached the bottom of the stairs, and Davian realized that his Essence was no longer the only illumination. He let his light wink out as Raeleth hurried over to a corner of the small room, picking up a chunk of stone about the size of Davian’s fist. It glowed a virulent yellow.
“Breachlight,” he said, snagging the two long coils of rope that had lain alongside it and looping them over his shoulder. “Cut it off myself.”
Davian frowned. A piece of the glowing chasm wall. “Is it dangerous?”
“Hasn’t killed me yet,” said Raeleth cheerfully. He saw Davian’s expression and shrugged. “It was pitch-black down here, and you know how dangerous it can be even with light. I had to try something.”
Davian snorted, but gestured for Raeleth to lead the way.
“So tell me more about your era,” said Raeleth as they began walking. He spoke quietly, but from his relaxed tone obviously didn’t think that there was much chance of their being discovered down here.
Davian gave him a surprised glance.
“I… had the impression that subject was off-limits,” he said carefully. He’d made similar inquiries of the entire team when he’d first arrived. On that occasion, he’d been told by Ched in no uncertain terms to let the matter lie.
“Not off-limits, exactly.” Raeleth shrugged awkwardly. “It was the only thing anyone talked about, for the first few weeks, but… well. We soon realized that there were two common threads to every conversation. One”—he held up a finger—“that the Venerate are still alive and in control, and two”—he held up another—“the further into the future things go, the worse things in Ilshan Gathdel Teth get. The harder it is for the resistance. The more of our people who become loyal to them, and despise the rest of our country.” He shook his head heavily. “The longer the Venerate rule, the more they have managed to shape our city—our society—to suit their views. Most of us are in here because of our opposition to those views, one way or another. So hearing about our failure to make a difference can be a touch…”
“Depressing,” finished Davian, understanding. “So why ask me?”
“Because we have time. And because you arrived three months after everyone else,” Raeleth reminded him. “Part of me hopes that you might have something different to say.”
He glanced across at Davian, and Davian felt an irrational twinge of guilt at the painfully hopeful gaze.
Still, he nodded slowly.
“What do you want to know?”
He spent the next twenty minutes answering questions as they navigated the narrow, rough-hewn tunnels. Davian was, much to Raeleth’s excitement, from much further into the future than anyone he had met thus far; Ana and Ched were both from almost a millennium before Davian’s time, apparently, and Raeleth was only a generation removed from the creation of the Boundary itself. By Davian’s reckoning, the most ‘recent’ prisoner Raeleth had spoken to was from more than three hundred years ago.
Davian had a thousand questions of his own but he kept them to himself for now, instead telling Raeleth what he knew of recent history, of Ilshan Gathdel Teth, of the Venerate and the current state of the Boundary. He left out the important details, though, skirting around anything he thought the Venerate could take advantage of in his own time. That wasn’t from any mistrust of Raeleth, but simply for the sake of prudence.
The tunnels often branched off in different directions, but Raeleth walked confidently, never hesitating at any of the forks, holding the yellow Breachlight aloft but clearly distracted as he listened to what Davian was saying.
Which was why Davian had to rush forward and haul him back after they turned a sharp corner.
“What are you…” Raeleth scrambled to his feet indignantly but trailed off as he saw where he had been about to step. “Oh. Oh no.”
The tunnel ahead, at first glance, looked no different from the others that they had been trudging down, but as Davian stared at it, it seemed to… glisten. The more he watched, the more he could see the walls, floor, and roof all shifting slightly, rippling and crawling with the wet, shadowy black of Dark.
“That… wasn’t here, last time,” said Raeleth. “Thank you.”
“El’s plan?” Davian asked, unable to resist.
Raeleth just gave him a wry smile. “There will be another way. We’re close.”
They backtracked, silent now as Raeleth guided them through a new set of passageways. The other man didn’t move with quite as much confidence as previously, but he still seemed unfazed by the detour.
“You know your way around,” observed Davian. He rubbed at his ears absently, a vague, low humming beginning to press down on them.
Raeleth gave a modest shrug. “I have a good memory.” He lowered the glowing stone in his hand and gestured ahead. “See?”
Davian blinked as he saw what Raeleth had already noticed: there was light farther down the passageway.
The two men increased their pace as it became easier to see, but Davian stuttered to a stop as he rounded the next corner, forced to shield his eyes against the abrupt blaze of yellow light. He stood there for several seconds, squinting, letting his eyes adjust—as much as they could—to the glare that surrounded them.
“Fates,” he murmured as his vision finally cleared.
He and Raeleth had emerged onto a narrow ledge, which had plainly once been another tunnel—one that had run parallel to where the massive split in the earth now lay. A single wall of the passageway had been shorn away, leaving a brief run of about thirty feet where it was possible to walk.
He steadied himself against the nearby wall, daring to lean slightly and peer upward.
“Fates,” he muttered again.
“We’re about a hundred feet down,” confirmed Raeleth, his starkly lit expression vaguely pleased at Davian’s reaction. “The bridge is… over there.” He waved his hand upward and to the left. “But even if someone was watching, I don’t think that they could see this deep. There’s just too much light.”
Davian licked his lips, frowning around at the burning yellow that coated the walls. “So… how do we get across from here, exactly?”
Raeleth silently pointed down and to the right from their position. Davian followed the gesture, not understanding.
Then he spotted it.
“That?” His heart sank as he examined the ledge that Raeleth was indicating. Perhaps ten feet down, it did jut out farther than everything else on the other side.
But it was still… fifteen feet away? More?
“I told you we’d need to jump.” Raeleth coughed. “Or… I suppose I was thinking that you could jump. With the rope. And then I would sort of… climb.”
Davian glared at him, then turned back and reassessed the gap. He could make it, with Essence lending his legs some extra strength.
Assuming that he didn’t slip, of course.
“All right,” he said reluctantly, unable to keep the growl from his voice. He glanced at the rope that Raeleth was uncoiling from around his shoulder, scowling. “You could have mentioned it was a big jump, though.”
Raeleth grinned. “Didn’t want you to worry about it until you had to.”
Davian grunted, carefully looping the rope around his waist and knotting it firmly as Raeleth secured the other end to a sturdy-looking piece of stone jutting from the wall. Davian tested it several times with a hard tug before nodding grimly.
He stared at the opposite ledge. It seemed an awfully long way away.
“No point in wasting time, I suppose,” he said with a tight smile.
He pulled in a breath, backing up against the wall to give himself as much of a run-up as possible.
Then he infused his legs with Essence. Sprinted.
Jumped.
Chapter 22
Davian reached the top of the stairs, scanning for any hint of movement on the flat rooftop before beckoning for Raeleth to follow.
The two of them crept forward onto the smooth sandstone surface, crouching low to avoid being obvious in the diffuse red moonlight. It had been almost two hours since he had leaped across the Breach, securing the rope to the northern wall and watching with his heart in his throat as Raeleth had shimmied—somewhat clumsily—across, bringing with him the spare coil in case something happened to the first. The other man had made it without issue, though, and no sounds had come from above to suggest they had been seen.
Since then, they had spent the entire time finding their way back to the surface through stairwells and passageways similar to those on the southern side—many more of these, though, coated in thick, rippling layers of grasping Dark. Davian was dreading the return trip; each step down there had been fraught, every motion burdened with the fear of a single lapse in concentration. They had even been forced to jump through a narrow section of corridor at one point, every surface for five feet entirely covered in glistening shadow. The oily black liquid had stretched greedily toward them from all sides when they’d leaped, perilously close to making contact.
But they had made it. Now all that remained was to watch the northern side of the bridge and wait for Isstharis to show herself.
“How long do you think until they move it?” murmured Davian, settling down and eyeing the al’goriat swarming the bridge below.
“Not for a while, I think.” Raeleth rubbed his hands together nervously. “The time I saw them taking the barrels across the bridge, it was later than this by a few hours.”
Davian accepted the statement—that lined up with what he’d seen, the night that he’d watched from the other side—and neither man talked for a minute as they observed the meandering Banes below.
“So were you a priest, or something? In your time?” he asked conversationally, keeping his voice low. While he didn’t want to make an excess of noise, there didn’t appear to be any al’goriat nearby. There was no danger in talking while they waited.
Raeleth glanced across at him. “What? No. I was a craftsman—mostly employed to make jewelry for wealthy women, to be honest,” he said, giving a small chuckle at Davian’s guess. “What did you do?”
“Me? I was training, learning to use Essence, until a couple of years ago. After that…” Davian shrugged. “Fighting against the Venerate, I suppose. Trying to stop the Boundary from collapsing.”
“It is hard to believe that the ilshara is still standing, after all that time,” Raeleth murmured.
“Hard to believe that you knew people who saw it go up.” Davian shook his head. “So what did you do, anyway? To be sent here, I mean. This hardly seems like the place they would send a simple craftsman.”
Raeleth didn’t answer for a few seconds, evidently ordering his thoughts.
“My parents’ generation were children when the Venerate came,” he finally said slowly. “The story goes that when the ilshara was raised, the Venerate went out of their way to make peace with those left in the north, when they could easily have wiped them out. They gathered the people together and told them that the rule of law would remain. They explained why they had invaded and what they believed about El, and insisted that others were free to believe otherwise—just so long as they accepted one another. They said that the Andarrans had been trapped just as much as they, and that until that wall of Essence could be overcome, we would all need to… get along.”
He shook his head dourly. “My grandparents hated them—a lot of people in their generation were killed in the war. There were protests, violent uprisings, a lot of unrest to begin with. But then the crops started dying, and the Venerate said it was because of the ilshara. They started working to create arable land around Ilshan Gathdel Teth, using their power to help the people. They did that for years. Legend has it that Cyr spent a month without sleep to create the Vessel that protects the city’s crops from decaying.”
“They spread stories,” said Davian.
“Not at all. They did all those things,” said Raeleth firmly. “And people started to realize that their best chance of survival was to work with them. Protesters gradually became unpopular, opposed by their fellow Andarrans. By the time my generation became adults, the Venerate were well on their way to being accepted. Many people my age even saw them as a cause to get behind, to advocate. They became the symbol of a united society, and those who dissented from that view were considered destructive by nature.” He shrugged. “Which meant that when the Venerate continued to scoff at believers in the, shall we say, ‘original’ El, people started to listen. To follow suit.”
