Between Kings, page 7
part #10 of The City Between Series Series
I pushed away from the memory entirely, tears rolling down my face, but this time I didn’t escape from the memory so much as I dipped out of it and back into it later on. No—not later in this exact memory, but into another small memory that was attached—or maybe it was woven in, I wasn’t sure. Before I could free myself from the cascade of memory that began at my parents’ murder, I found myself in that other, smaller memory. A mirrored memory of the one I’d just escaped was playing, right up at the front of Athelas’ mind; bloody, hot, and ruthless, it showed everything that I’d tried to escape—the murders themselves. I pressed myself to the other side of Athelas’ mind, and heard Lord Sero’s voice say coldly, “I see that you’re getting better at keeping the useless details to yourself. Very good. Our briefings may well get to a reasonable length of time at this rate. The heirling attached…?”
“Will never leave the house, my lord,” said Athelas’ voice, smoothly. “I made very sure, as you saw in the result of my night’s work for yourself just now. I used the bone knife—even could all of the separate parts be gathered together, there isn’t a necromancer in the worlds who could cause those bodies to set a foot outside the house.”
“Enough,” said Lord Sero, releasing the memory. “I have no wish to be incriminated should the king begin to ask questions. Tell me no more than you must.”
The memory sank, but not far, still hovering at the front of his mind and obscuring other memories as Lord Sero’s version of the burrowing information worm turned in on itself in a coiling of Between and fae magic that ate itself and then disappeared.
Athelas’ mind didn’t exactly become less cautious, but it did seem to uncoil slightly, and I slipped out of the memory while I could, shaken and sick in equal measures. I wondered if Athelas knew how close he’d come to being killed by Lord Sero that night as a direct result of his own hubris. Probably. He might even have delighted in it, for all I knew. Playing games with my life and my parents’ lives and then living to tell the tale even after defying orders in order to play his games.
The shattered and slowly uncoiling inner corridor of his mind hadn’t suggested that conclusion, but I knew that there had been many moments where Athelas had genuinely enjoyed being with me. The most reasonable explanation I had for that was that Athelas had delighted in the trickery he had been engaged in. The cleverness of it—the twistiness of it.
Maybe even the danger of it, though that suddenly made me think again of both sides of the memory I had seen of the moment I had offered Athelas the dryad. He had been so tempted to take it, in that moment.
What I did know was that if Lord Sero had caught sight of the part of the memory that held the bargain Athelas had made with my parents—or any hint of the part that contained me and the command for me to never leave the house—Athelas wouldn’t have left the manor that night or ever again.
I floated where I was for a moment to catch my breath and caught it on a sob instead. I don’t know when I’d started to cry, but it felt as though I might have been crying for a while.
Athelas’ voice said, “Did I not say so, Pet? Will you never learn?”
“Nope,” I said, tears gliding down my cheeks and my voice rough with the ache in my throat. “Doesn’t look like it. Can’t hang around: I’ve still got more to find out, so if you’d stop trying to warn me about things I already know, that’d be nice.”
I heard JinYeong’s voice in the real world and knew that the tears must be falling out there, too. I felt a sudden rush of warmth and slightly unsteady happiness: it couldn’t be fun for him to sit out there, not able to help, just watching me cry. But there he was. A little bit of pressure around my hand—a warmth around my shoulders.
I would have to give him a kiss when I got out of this torturously twisty world that was Athelas’ mind.
“There is nothing more for you here,” Athelas said sharply, and the environment around me grew spiky and poisonous.
I knew then that he was preparing to fight me for every memory I went after—and I knew then that for all the things he’d hidden that had come to light, Athelas had still more he wanted to hide.
And I knew, with cold, spiky certainty, that I couldn’t let him stop me now. There were things I needed to know—questions that needed to be settled—and so much more to discover about the things that Athelas didn’t want to be found.
“It is time, I think,” he said, “for you to leave.”
“I told you,” I said, and my voice was harsh. “I’m not here to ask questions, I’m here to get answers. Don’t reckon you can stop me.”
He tried to stop me. He tried with an almost feral savagery, in fact, and perhaps I could have been gentler with him if my thoughts hadn’t been so full of my dead parents.
It wasn’t even necessarily that I thought it would do any good; I knew it would do no good. I suspected the kind of no good it would do, too; and yet I couldn’t stop myself. I needed to know what other secrets lay in Athelas’ mind. I needed to know them because although it wouldn’t change how I felt about him, it would make a difference in what I did from now onward. It would make a difference to a lot of other things, too.
And perhaps I wanted to punish him—make him feel as powerless as my parents must have felt as they died. So I didn’t try to be gentle. I didn’t try to spare his pride or his pain—I seared through his mind like a hot knife through butter, forcing my way through, ripping memories from here and there. Finding anything that matched what I wanted to see, what I needed to know.
And when I had found them, I huddled them all together and sank into them, one by one.
Chapter Four
I was cold and aching from clenching my teeth by the time I came back out again. JinYeong was there as he always was, warm and present; I opened my eyes to see his face just a few centimetres away, his arms around me. Those black, bloody eyes looked right into the cold shock that must have been in mine.
“Shall I bite him?” he asked.
Athelas laughed behind him, soft and weary.
“No,” I said. “We’re probably going to need him later. And he’s gunna pay what he’s due to pay once everything’s sorted out.”
“What did you see this time?”
“I saw him killing people,” I said. “Heirlings. Champions. A lot of people.”
“You shouldn’t have looked if you didn’t want to see,” Athelas said, as I touched JinYeong’s cheek in a wordless thank-you and released myself from his arms.
Athelas didn’t look at me—wouldn’t look at me for quite some time, I suspected. I couldn’t say for sure, but I was almost certain he had been taken aback at how swiftly and easily I had taken memories from him.
And I was almost certain that he was now very much afraid.
I met JinYeong’s eyes for a brief instant before a tumble of movement in the doorway drew our attention. Les, a fork in either hand and a wild look to his eyes, stared at us and then at Athelas.
He gabbled, “Lady! There’s a bad smell about the place! Who brought it into the house?”
“A bad—” I stopped and stared at Athelas, whose eyes were fixed on Les as if he couldn’t quite believe what he was seeing.
I don’t often get the chance to see him so completely shocked, and I’m not gunna lie: it was flamin’ satisfying.
“Still alive,” he murmured to himself. “Truly impressive: an almost cockroach echelon of survival skill, in fact.”
“After all the times you tried to kill him, you mean?” I asked. “Don’t worry, Les: I won’t let him have another go at you. He can’t get out.”
“Can’t is as can’t does,” Les said, with unexpected severity. “Lady, you can’t keep bad smells in the house! They get in the curtains!”
“I can assure you that I’ve no intention of lingering in the curtains,” said Athelas, showing his steel-lined cuffs. “And I would leave if I could, but alas…”
“You’re not going anywhere until we’ve got a few more answers about a heck of a lot of things—and definitely not until Zero’s back to take you wherever criminals get taken Behind.”
“Indeed?” he said, and the raw fear I thought I had seen was gone as if it had never been. “Well, no doubt we will weather these things as we must. I’ve a suspicion that you’re going to be rather too busy outside the house to allow your attention to dwell on me.”
“I know you worked pretty hard not to die up until now,” I told him. “But even a good run has to end some time, and I reckon you’re about at the end of yours.”
He shrugged one shoulder, entirely at his ease again. “All good things must end, after all, Pet.”
“You know what’s flamin’ irritating about you?” I asked him. Of all the times he should be afraid, now was the time. Whether or not I got into his memories, he was going to die at the end of this—why was he more afraid of me taking his memories than he was of dying?
“I’m certain you’re going to tell me,” he said mildly. “I believe I’ll save my strength.”
“Every time we peel a layer off of you, there’s another even twistier layer underneath. It’s flamin’ annoying.”
“Lady,” said Les, even more urgently, “you shouldn’t stay in this room. Whoever smelt it dealt it, and—”
“I might point out that this is one of the more irritating conversations I’ve had,” Athelas pointed out, his eyes dwelling coldly and emotionlessly on Les in a way that made me shudder. “The pain is not wholly your own, I assure you.”
Les must have felt the same menace that I did, because he backed toward the doorway and sidled through it into the lounge room. I heard his voice say, “Lady, I hie me,” and then his bare feet trotting across the carpet. Goodness knows where his shoes had gone this time. I’d have to get him another pair when I could.
“Don’t threaten my friends,” I told Athelas.
“That,” said Athelas, “is not a friend. Nor should it be.”
“For a bloke who pretended to be my friend and tried to kill me, that’s flamin’ rich.”
“Good heavens, what an appalling habit I seem to have formed!” Athelas said, more to himself than me. “Comfort yourself, Pet: I’ll refrain from useless warnings.”
“Will you though?” I said, meeting his eyes just before they dropped. “Because that’s one of the things I’m not sure about. I’ll be back to pinch a few memories from you later, as well.”
“I see,” he said. “Am I to be shut in my own mind again while you’re presumably about your business? I won’t take it so easily this time.”
JinYeong rose with a small sniff of a laugh, drawing the cold look of dislike from Athelas once again, and offered his hand to me.
I took that hand and let him pull me up. “You’ll just have to wonder about that until you find out,” I said to Athelas.
“I really do wonder why you bother to search my mind for things you already know.”
“Yeah, but I don’t already know ’em,” I pointed out. “I know what you’ve told me, and nothing else. You can’t expect me to trust what you’ve said after everything you’ve done.”
“And thus we have another layer,” he said, smiling faintly as he leaned back. He closed his eyes as well, but if he thought that was going to do any good, he was pretty quickly going to learn otherwise.
“Yeah. You’re a flamin’ onion at this point,” I said, and slipped back into his mind one last time to bind him safely within his memories.
Once we were down in the kitchen again, I said to Les, “You gotta stop skulking off to other places without letting us know. I keep thinking something has grabbed you.”
“I know all the doors, lady,” he said.
I managed to stop myself from rolling my eyes as I went through the freezer for the last of the bread. “Okay, but tell me next time you’re going somewhere, all right?”
“I know the doors,” he said again, with unexpected emphasis. “I can go in and out where I need to go.”
“Are you telling me not to worry about you?”
“That one would live through an explosion,” JinYeong said dismissively, leaning around me to grab a blood bag as I took the butter out of the fridge.
“Worry is not currency, lady,” said Les. “I accept food and drink only.”
He toddled off into the living room again as if he’d made perfect sense and I went on with the breakfast, though I said to JinYeong, nodding at his blood bag, “You’re eating a lot these days.”
“I should be ready to fight,” he said. “If I do not eat, I will not fight as well.”
“Weird,” I said, staring at him. “Thought that was just hunger. You fight better after blood?”
“I fight verry well, all the time.”
“Yes, but you fight better after blood?”
JinYeong gave a faint, assenting tilt of his nose. “Keurae. Blood is always necessary.”
“Better make sure you stock up for when we know the king’s name, then,” I said, and ducked into the cupboards to see how many cans of baked beans we still had.
Daniel came in with Chantelle and Kevin while I was cooking toast and beans and leaned on the kitchen island as if he was too restless to sit down. He probably was.
“What are we doing today?” he asked. “We can have a bit more of a look at the underground section of the Hobart Rivulet, but there’s probably not too much more to find that’s worth the time looking. There’s a map you can look up online, too.”
“We’ll have to take our chances with the rivulet later,” I said. “I already know enough about it to be comfortable there. I need you to go see Five: JinYeong and I need to get rid of the brownies and find a portal for him today.”
“Why are we—”
“Most of the stuff that the humans left with Tuatu is filed in a behindkind sorta way, apparently,” I told him. “Wonder if they—ah, that’s not important. I reckon they had a bit of behindkind help in the old days as well. The important thing is, Marazul reckons we’ll be able to go through it all a lot easier and find names a lot more easily if someone with behindkind access and a behindkind portal goes through the lot of it.”
“Can’t the leprechaun go Behind and find one himself?”
“Nope,” I said. “You remember how I said someone was sent to kill me a little while ago?”
He stared at me. “That was the dropbears thing out Huon way?”
“Yeah. And they’ve blackballed him from Behind because he wouldn’t kill me. So we’re gunna find him a portal—he deserves a bit of fun after all of this, and we could use the help.”
Practically, Chantelle asked, “Where are we going to get a portal for the leprechaun?”
“Thought you lot might know,” I said. “What about Upper Management? They had a lot of machinery there last time we snuck in.”
“We did not sneak in,” JinYeong said. “We walked.”
“Stalked, more like,” I said.
I could still remember the stark terror of striding down the halls of Upper Management to meet with a harpy named Richard, expecting to be lynched the entire way down the hall. Pretending not to be afraid. Pretending that we were the ones who ought to frighten everyone. It felt like a lifetime ago, but it hadn’t even been half a year.
“What about that place your lot cleaned out when you collected the leprechaun? You told me it was a whole setup out there in the Valley. They’d have one, wouldn’t they?”
I threw a look of admiration at Daniel. “Look at you, using your brain and everything! I reckon they might have; there was a lot of stuff that we just left there. Zero seemed to think that someone would come to clean it up, but it wasn’t that long ago, so they might not have got to it yet.”
“We will find out,” said JinYeong. He seemed brighter and more energised than he had earlier, as if the blood bag he’d sucked dry had been half sunshine.
I knew better—JinYeong was happy because today meant mischief. Whether that mischief was losing a group of brownies somewhere along Campbell Street or fighting them off somewhere Between, it meant that there would be blood. Like any self-respecting vampire, JinYeong delighted in blood.
Almost as much as he delighted in making trouble.
“Today, we are dating again,” he said, and that explained a bit more of the smug mischief in his eyes. “You should wear the clothes.”
“We’re going to have to go Between as soon as we lose the brownies,” I pointed out. “We’ve got to make it to the Huon Valley, and I’m not gunna fight whatever we meet on the way in a silk shirt.”
JinYeong pouted slightly and said, “There is a suede jacket. It is warm for Between and it will slow a blade.”
“Fair enough,” I said. Until we wanted to lose the brownies, we wanted to lull them into a false sense of security, and there wasn’t a better way to do that than to start out exactly as we had yesterday. “But we’re going to have to lose the brownies. We don’t want them knowing that we’re looking for a portal, and we definitely don’t want them following us Between or to the Valley. You’re wearing your best tie.”
JinYeong gave a small sniff of amusement and grinned expansively enough to show his teeth. The tie was definitely not his best, and he had caught the joke. “We will have a verrry enjoyable date,” he said.
Daniel rolled his eyes.
I said to him, “I’ll text you Five’s address: let him know that we’re working on getting a portal for him and ask him to meet us at the house—no, take him around to Vesper’s place. If the brownies go back to the house to find someone else to follow or to wait for us, we don’t want them to know what all of our connections are.”
“Got it,” said Daniel. “Good luck. Call me if you need us to come and clean up a few brownies so you can get away.”
“Will do,” I told him, and went upstairs to get my jacket.
It was a warmer morning than I’d expected when I got outside with JinYeong. The sunshine made the suede jacket and leather trousers uncomfortably hot, but I ignored the discomfort. We’d be going Between before long, and it was always at least a few degrees colder there—not to mention far more likely to see bare arms or legs scratched up with something that could paralyse you, kill you, or both.
