The Void Ascendant, page 7
But I reached for that surety now and found nothing. A void of uncertainty. The thing looked less like her than a sister or a cousin: the bones all different, the skull different, let alone the scales and the eyes and the missing scar and the dorsal fin.
“You’re going to have me bricked in anyway,” it said. “I thought it was a bluff. But I can smell the mortar. So why should I tell you anything?”
“Because I could have them stop,” I said. “And we could have a conversation like reasonable people. Or I could have them stop and I could have you tortured. And now I see you cannot say your own name. Why? Did you forget it? Did you forget your line? Didn’t practice enough?”
It turned away to cough up a black blob of blood, streaked with other colours like a glass marble. The clot wriggled disconcertingly before sliding down the floor drain.
I stepped backwards. I wanted to scream at the spy, attack it, bound as it was, and close my hands around its throat. I could already imagine how the scales there would feel as they cut into my palms. The thing would fight back, but I was bigger than it was, far bigger, and it would be so easy to not even feel it as it kicked and thrashed. You dare! You thief! Impostor!
No. What was important was the war. Not that this thing could interfere with the war, but that it had even tried: that was what was important. I would just have to set aside the human in me and focus on being the Head of Royal Military Intelligence. Be like the Advisor: a job, not a name. Just get the information and everything would go back to normal. Remember, there wouldn’t even be any fighting here. It would be a war far away. And I would be safe and warm in my tower.
Behind me I sensed the presence and weight of the two masons, the little man and his assistant, waiting. The best mortar, I thought. The finest materials. Kept aside specially in case of a request by someone illustrious: like a Prophet.
I stepped back outside, shut and locked the first door, shut and locked the second, handed the keys to the Advisor.
“What were you looking for in the Archive?” I said through the grate. “Tell me, and maybe there will be mercy.”
“Are you... Why do you keep talking like that?” the spy said.
I gestured to the mason. He and his assistant meticulously began to lay the first layer of stones across the doorway. I paused long enough to hear the scrape and clink of their trowels, so that the thing in the cell could hear it too.
“The war, creature,” I said. “You expect me to think it’s a coincidence that six spies were captured in the Royal Compound the day it was announced? Just tell me. How did you get into the Archive? Who sent you? What were you trying to steal?”
“I wasn’t trying to steal anything!” it finally burst out, twisting on the short chains of the shackles. “They didn’t find anything on me. They can tell you that!”
“Then what were you doing in there?”
“None of your goddamn business!”
“It is,” I said. “It’s war. That’s all my business now.”
The thing writhed, seeming to waver between genuine laughter and tears of rage. “You! What a fucking joke. You coward, you hypocrite. What did they do to you?”
“The stones are up to my waist now, spy. Maybe if you prove that you know something, I’ll ask them to stop. And we can have a conversation as if you were a person, and not a monster.”
“Fuck you. Torture me then.”
“Why do you think I won’t? Is that what they told you to think? That I would be fooled by you, that I had no power here?”
It turned again on its next rotation of the chains and stared at me, the mismatched eyes widening. “Wait a minute. Are you doing spells here? Do they know you can do magic?”
The Advisor stiffened next to me, then went still, the kind of stillness that only his people could hold, pupils fixed, feathers unmoving. My heart gonged in my chest like a bell. “An interesting lie,” I said, but my voice sounded weak even to me. I threw my shoulders back and attempted a sneer. “Of course you know I meant the power of my position. Not magical powers. I cannot do magic. Only the Royal Sorcerers can, with the express permission of the Masters.”
It wasn’t even listening. “Did you tell them? Or did they test you? They didn’t, did they? Oh my God. Look at your face. They really don’t know. You’ve really kept it hidden all this time. Incredible.”
The masons could go no higher while I stood there. The thing’s face was inhumanly smug. Even then I thought it was not too late to change my mind and take it out and have it tortured. It’s what the Queen would want, part of me said calmly. It’s what’s good for the kingdom. The thing’s pain traded for safety and peace. For lives. Yes.
And then kill it at the end. A mercy. If I had a soul, my soul would be washed clean in its blood. For being so merciful. For doing the right thing.
Yes. Information first. Then death. The stones were unreasonable. But I was a reasonable man. And the thing had forced my hand; really, it was making its own decision on what happened next, not me. It was the one who had slammed shut every door leading to its salvation.
“Very well,” I said, “you leave me no choice but to...” Outside, faint shouts rose up from ground level, cries of alarm rather than fear. A moment later a strange bell began to ring, not one I recognized. The Advisor cocked his head.
“Fire,” he said. “Someone—” He stopped short, glancing at the hallway that led to the stairs. The bell had fallen silent, its last clang still reverberating, but the shouting had become screaming, and the air was filling with smoke.
“Well,” I said to the spy, “you may have a quicker death than thirst, it seems.”
“Your Holiness,” said the Advisor. “We should go now.”
“Just a mom—what was that?”
A shadow flitted overhead, too large for a bird, just a dark shape interrupting the moonlight, barely visible behind the clouds of choking smoke rising up the stairs and, impossibly, the central well of the dungeon, which led only to bedrock. I instinctively covered my face with the sleeve of my robe. The Advisor was already at the top of the stairs, beckoning frantically as he flapped his wings to dispel the smoke around his face. “Prophet!”
“Keeper!” I coughed, ducked low to get out of the smoke layer. “Get the prisoners out! The spies! They cannot die until we have questioned them!”
“Forget them, Your Holiness!” The Advisor galloped back and took my arm, entirely against protocol; I hadn’t actually been touched by someone for so long that I jumped and yanked my arm back, coughing loudly.
“Shackle them together!” I shouted. “Christ! Where did he go?”
“The lower level is on fire,” the Advisor said, his wings buffeting my shoulders. “He must have gone to get his men out. Please, Prophet! Forget the prisoners. Your life is more important.”
“The war is more important than any of us, for fuck sake!”
“What?”
The mason and his assistant had fled too; I snarled as I ran back to Cell Eighteen, where the spy was looking around interestedly, coughing as the smoke began to filter in. Its exterior window darkened for a moment and I leapt backwards, finally putting it together.
“It’s an escape attempt!” I shouted. “From the outside! Find the Keeper, or at least the keys!”
The Advisor’s reply vanished in the noise as the building shook, and a low rumble began from below us. Was something bombarding the masonry? Well, good fucking luck, I thought wildly, looking around at the unmoved walls.
Footsteps sounded from the stairs, people running up rather than down, and for a second all I could do was watch in horror as a dozen guards emerged, pursued by a handful of strangers clad in loose brown and gray clothing with masks tied firmly around their faces. The Advisor spotted them at once and swept me behind him with his wings, a sudden slap of feathers as hard as stone, so that I fell onto the floor. “Protect the Prophet!” he cried.
“Protect the Prophet!” one of the guards repeated thoughtlessly, and only then realized his mistake, as the strangers looked up, almost as one, and spotted me still scrambling to rise. I could see the wheels turning in their head: The Prophet? What is he doing here?
Kill the Prophet!
“Oh, forget me,” I began angrily, staggering to my feet and seizing the Advisor’s wing to stay upright; he began to speak before the building rocked again, more drastically this time, like an earthquake, and our voices were drowned out by the crunch and thud of falling stone meeting cobbles and walls. Something landed on the roof and scrabbled there, sweeping smoke down the light well and darkening the entire dungeon. The guards shouted in anger and pain as they grappled with the strangers, metal clanging.
The building took one more enormous hit and tipped for good as one side collapsed, sending me and the Advisor sliding around the circle towards the melee. I screamed in nothing more than sheer rage as moonlight and wind broke in from the wall next to Cell Eighteen, where something had smashed a hole from the outside in.
“Him!” someone shouted in Low Dath, a new speaker. “In the red robes! Kill him!”
The Advisor leapt up, snarling; I got out my crystal dagger. My eyes burned, my throat burned, I had coughed so hard that my stomach was starting to hitch, but I’d be fucked if I went down without a fight.
Wait, I could do one better than the flimsy crystal blade: on the floor gleamed a handful of weapons dropped either by the guards or the intruders, including a double-handed sword like the one I’d been training on, though longer and heavier. I pocketed the dagger and held the sword in both hands: Position Five, Stance of the Leaf.
The strangers rushed us, splitting up to break down the iron-hard wooden doors of the other cells with some kind of small explosive, or spell, I couldn’t tell which, exponentially multiplying the noise levels alongside the rising screams of the prisoners and the guards.
Bombs? Wait, were those—
Something flew at my head and absolutely by reflex, not thinking at all, I swung my sword and batted it back the way it had come; shrieks rose in a chorus before I even registered the sound of the explosion. As if in answer, someone ran at me—a cloud, muffled in his baggy brown disguise. In a split second the fight became a mere matter of physics. My arms were longer than his and so was my sword and I swept it down and bludgeoned him across both forearms, spraying bright blood into the air and sending him screaming to the floor.
I fought back towards the torn-open Cell Eighteen, slipping on the tilted floor and the fresh pools of blood. The intruders had expected resistance but I still took down five or six of them, dimly registering, from the corner of my eye, at least one of them pursuing me not to attack but to drive his dagger into the throats of the fallen. Like me, I thought, in the microseconds of coherence between thrusts and sweeps, just like me, saying No, they will not have you, they cannot have you alive.
The air pressure changed abruptly, sending my hair and beard streaming past my face. Something had finally torn away the rest of the wall, ripping open the spy’s cell and those next to it like a shoebox diorama. The spy dangled from its shackles in grim silence, moonlight glaring off its pallid skin, as a set of gleaming claws longer than it was tall closed on either edge of the broken stone. A creature that had climbed up the tower, I thought dazedly, or flown there, or... As I snapped back to reality, I realized it didn’t matter. Whatever it was, it had come specifically to rescue the spies.
Or not all of them.
Not all.
“No!” I screamed. “Not that one! Advisor! Don’t let them get it! Kill it!” I raced towards the hole, the claws, the dangling spy, the man climbing awkwardly down the creature’s sloped neck towards it.
The creature swung one clawed paw with ponderous grace and smashed out the thick iron bar that the spy’s shackles were attached to, like someone scooping a seed out of a ripe tulmar. No time, no time, I was running out of time, but I scrambled up the broken stone, stepped on a limp body, raced through the two doors and into the gaping cell.
My entrance startled the stranger for a second, just long enough for me to begin to reach back with my sword, but my swing was stopped short with a teeth-rattling clang that at first I could not even understand. Only when someone seized me by the throat did I realize that the spy had thrust its shackles in the path of a blow meant to kill me. Dagger or short sword, I thought clinically, still too shocked to think for a second; they had both moved very fast. The building sagged again, as if in warning.
“Take him too!” the spy shouted in Low Dath to the man who held me, grasping his free arm, which still held the dagger, with its shackled hands. “Take him with us!”
“What?” the man screamed back as I thrashed. “Have you lost your mind?”
The spy yanked hard at his arm, startling him enough that he slackened his grip; the bar and chains crashed to the floor of her cell, now disintegrating stone by stone like the wall behind us, as the flapping monster thrashed for its own grip on the edges of the hole. The spy was free, though still chained at the wrists. It shouted, “I’ll explain after! Take him or we all die here!”
The Advisor shouldered his way in front of me, putting his body between me and the creature, and for a split second I felt torn between gratitude and fury. That the creature should fucking dare to try to kidnap me in this disaster, that—
The clawed flying thing outside tensed, and I only had a second to think Oh I was so wrong, I assumed too much, of course I did, before the limb—not a bird’s limb at all but a long, boneless, writhing thing—whipped out and slapped the Advisor aside with a sickening crack of bone and flesh, and then clenched, fist-tight, around my midsection and snaked me through the hole.
I flailed at it uselessly with my sword, vision already graying from the crushing grip, the blade rebounding without any visible effect from the thin glistening layer of scales, and then we were outside, a clear night sky, white clouds, moons, and everything went dark.
CHAPTER FOUR
Light returned moments later, along with several other things: noise, stench, pain, the ability to draw in a full breath, and the strange sensation of being lightly slapped all over my face. I snarled, shook my head sharply, and waited for my senses to give me something to work with.
“Stay still, motherfucker,” someone said conversationally in Low Dath, so near my ear that I recoiled from it. “Ropes can go around necks too, you know.”
“Itzlek,” said someone else, “don’t kill him. We need him.”
“So she says,” the voice said. The pain continued along several axes, but my eyes were adjusting and I stared around the confusing, pattering darkness. Hands tied, feet tied, and hands tied to feet where I knelt. What was hitting me in the face, aside from Itzlek’s threats, whoever he was, was clots of dirt and small stones. The air was cold and close and smelled of soil, and all around was a continuous loud rumbling, regular as machinery. Nothing made sense. I waited, and kept my lips and eyes shut against the onslaught of dirt.
“It’s pure madness,” someone said distantly, “taking him. They’ll…”
“I know what I’m doing.” The voice of the spy. So it was here. Had survived. I snarled with rage, all unheard.
Someone said, “You said you’d explain.”
“When we’re safe. Not before.”
Typical, I thought. Cagey as fuck. They trained the thing well, whoever trained it. That sneer in the voice: I knew that sneer.
The rain of dirt and stones on my face slowed, then stopped, as did the sound of crunching and crashing. A lantern bobbed towards me seemingly on its own in the darkness: no, just held by someone tall, whose long insectile arm carried the light far before his masked face could be seen. Behind him were two others, also in masks, stinking of blood; without comment, they dragged me out of whatever we had been in. I glanced back once, seeing what looked inexplicably like a mud-covered wicker basket.
It dawned on me that we had indeed burrowed out of the compound, and had been travelling in something towed behind the burrowing animal. If guards had been searching for us, they would be looking at the sky, not the ground. Like swapping cars during a heist, I thought, and almost laughed out loud. All right. No chance to escape down here, who knew how deep we were, and I couldn’t go anywhere except straight back into the tunnel where we’d come from. But we couldn’t stay down here forever. I closed my eyes again as they hauled me away. Okay, outnumbered, disarmed, tied up, and surrounded by enemies. Stay calm. Regroup.
When the chance comes: run. Get back home. And then hunt these bastards down and make them talk.
We swapped ‘trailers’ three more times, and finally they cut the bonds on my feet so we could walk up a stone ramp, splashing through shallow stagnant water. Someone unceremoniously threw a piece of cloth over my head and secured it with rope just as we entered the complex-looking metal door at the end of the ramp. Hooded now, I was manhandled for a long time with muttered swearing, occasionally thrown into walls or doors, usually accompanied by dark chuckles and sarcastic apologies. The spy never interceded.
Stay calm, I repeated to myself, clenching my teeth so hard they squeaked. Stay calm. Rummage through the memory for something useful from the old days. Only chance now. You know something that will help. You know a little, down there under all that denial.
When we finally stopped, the makeshift hood was untied and I blinked dirt and sweat out of my eyes, feeling tears stream down my cheeks in an effort to wash out the filth; I half-instinctively tried to wipe my face, forgetting that my hands were still bound.
The place was dimly lit, and stank of smoke and unwashed bodies, like animal musk. It made me think of the cats scent-marking things in the palace, arrogantly lifting their chins and staring at you as if daring you to protest that this was your palace, not theirs. A small fire burned at the far end, an obvious concession to the need to boil bandages for the wounded spies and rescuers now being hauled in behind me.
