Eight Will Fall, page 19
Larkin sagged with defeat. There was nothing honorable about continuing when death was inevitable. It was just stupid.
“We follow Tamsyn’s map and keep going.” Jacque slid a blade from her pocket and polished it on a scrap of linen she had found. “We have no other option, and the queen would want us to continue.”
Larkin’s eyes darted to Amias. As stoic as he was, his emotion grew violent at the mention of Melay. He forced it back.
Larkin wasn’t as easily forgiving. “Melay isn’t here. You can spare us the performance.”
“She’s doing her best to keep the people of Demura alive.” Jacque’s doubt was a pang in Larkin’s side.
“How long have you been telling yourself that lie, Jacque?”
Jacque parted her lips.
“Larkin,” Amias said softly. “You don’t—”
“Let Jacque speak for herself.” Larkin waited for Amias to retort, but he only pressed his lips together. He knows I’m right, she thought, her eyes grazing the group. They all do.
To Larkin’s surprise, Jacque’s will collapsed, and she said, “A long time.”
Larkin sat back. At least she admitted it. “Why?”
“Survival.” Jacque observed the others cautiously, hesitant. “I was in the ranks to become a lieutenant, Larkin. I joined the army to funnel money home. Somehow managed to sneak in under the name Jacqueline, my mother’s name, and the common surname of Harper. I defied the queen then, but once I was in the army, I knew how much I could lose if I defied her again. I have three sisters. And Risa.” She reached up to find the end of her ponytail, but then dropped her hand. “If I broke any more rules, I could lose them.”
Larkin swallowed, glancing away in embarrassment. She was so focused on the betrayal of an Empath employed by the queen that she had never thought to ask why the soldier enlisted.
“My battalion found out I was an Empath,” said Jacque. “I thought I was done for, but my lieutenant brought me to this outpost up north, near the sea. She sat me down in barracks full of soldiers and told me that everyone within the room supported me and was ready for Melay’s strictures against Empaths to change. They all believed we had a chance to do good things with our magic.”
“Rebel soldiers?” Larkin asked with surprise. Soldiers who wanted to help set Empaths free from Melay’s rule?
“Just because you didn’t know about them doesn’t mean they don’t exist,” said Jacque.
“What happened then?” Elf scooted closer to Jacque, still clutching the femur.
“I said no.” Shame fell from her. “I had too much at stake. I couldn’t be their emblem. I couldn’t afford to be part of a rebellion. I needed to keep sending money back home. But maybe if I had rebelled, we would have dethroned Melay and none of this would have happened.”
“No,” Larkin said. “Kyran would still be terrorizing the Surface. People would still have died. You…” Larkin paused, her anger leaving her as quickly as it had taken hold. “You were looking out for your family. You did what I would have done.”
Casseem interrupted them, watching Larkin as he spoke. “What we did in the past, who we were on the Surface, that doesn’t matter here. The only way we can survive and save those we love is to keep moving and hope we don’t die along the way.”
A purple welt was forming on Casseem’s cheek. Was this his way of making amends with Larkin? She was tired of all the anger and frustration she felt from fighting Casseem.
“We move forward?” asked Elf.
“We move forward,” Larkin repeated. “We’re not going to fall to the same fate as the soldiers. We have magic, after all.” Even though Kyran had murdered an entire village of Empaths, she had to believe that their magic was enough.
“I don’t.” Tamsyn threw his scroll case across the cavern floor. “I am completely useless. I’ve studied for years, but I can’t make sense of anything that’s happened so far. You might as well leave me behind.”
“You’re not staying back, Arkwright,” Casseem said.
Larkin agreed. “We need you. Plus, we need your flair for the dramatic. Fuel for our magic.” She winked at Tamsyn.
Tamsyn groaned and lay down. “Happy to hear you’re making use of my terror and anger and general insecurities.”
Casseem nudged Tamsyn with his toe. “Thank you for your service.”
Truce, Larkin thought. She hoped it would last.
TWENTY-FOUR
When Larkin woke, Elf was gone.
Her mind immediately went to Brielle and she shot up, sensing the surrounding space for any jarring emotion, but the vivid dreams of the others were distracting.
Elf couldn’t be alone. None of them could be alone.
As Larkin stumbled to her feet and hurried through the narrow exit of the sleeping chamber, a shudder gripped her. Elf’s emotions were like a lute out of tune, but she was somewhere close.
Larkin found Elf near the polyped trees and bit back a scream.
Elf crouched in front of the soldiers’ corpses, examining what she’d dismembered. A filthy blade lay on the ground near Elf, discarded. She had flayed the remaining skin and sinew from the bones and broken up the skeletons, arranging everything in front of her as if she were organizing the mundane, like clothing or food.
Elf wore nothing but her sleeveless tunic, parts of the shirt destroyed so that her back was mostly bare.
Larkin clapped a hand over her mouth when she saw Elf’s back. Bony growths jutted from between her shoulder blades. Blood trickled from her broken skin. Shaking, Larkin searched for Kyran’s rage but found nothing.
Elf turned around. She must have sensed Larkin’s horror.
“You’re awake!” she exclaimed. “You should go back to sleep. Your dreams are so lovely to work with.” Her face puckered, and she rolled her eyes. “Tamsyn and Amias are awake too.”
“What are you doing?” Larkin cried.
Elf frowned. “It’s none of your business, really.”
“Like hells it isn’t!” Larkin hissed, then paused as she heard the footsteps of the others approaching.
Amias was the first to reach her. “Kyran’s doing?”
“No, I don’t sense him,” said Larkin, her mind veering to the tangle of corpses behind them. Brielle, losing her mind in the labyrinth as her skin was slowly peeled away by an unseen tormentor. Bianca’s everlasting life, and her ability to mend her villagers. The quartermaster.
Destruction and conjuration of flesh and bone.
“She’s doing this to herself,” Larkin whispered.
“How did you make these?” Tamsyn’s voice was measured, but Larkin sensed a curling thread of morbid intrigue.
He walked to Elf and knelt, reaching out as though to touch the strange growths.
Elf tilted her head toward the dismembered carcasses. Tamsyn jerked back his hand. His curiosity flared. “What does it feel like? Can you move them?”
“Not yet.” Elf hopped to her feet with grace, turning back to Larkin. “Are we ready to go?”
Larkin knew that her stiff smile wasn’t fooling Elf, though the girl seemed oblivious to her and Amias’s panic. “Amias and I will go wake the others.” She looked to Tamsyn. “Watch her?”
Tamsyn’s eyes widened as he attempted to inconspicuously shake his head.
Elf distracted herself with rearranging the bones, and Larkin mouthed Watch her! She grabbed Amias’s arm and dragged him back to their camp, waking Jacque and Casseem and quickly relaying what had happened.
“She’s going insane!” hissed Larkin as Jacque scrambled for her sword.
“Wait, wait, what are you going to do with that?” Larkin pointed to the weapon.
“What do you think?” Jacque yanked the sword from its sheath. “I’m going to cut those damn things off!”
“You’ll hurt her,” Larkin protested. At least, Larkin thought she would. She didn’t really know, never having seen anyone use magic this way before.
“We need to be calm about this.” Casseem threw a pack over his shoulder. “We can’t panic Elf. Not if we want her to explain why she’s doing this.”
“Be calm?” Jacque gripped her sword.
“Wait until you see her,” Larkin muttered.
“Well, I believe in you,” Casseem said coolly, swiping up another bag from the ground.
He strode from the cave, Larkin close behind him. When Elf came into view, he halted. A strangled choking noise escaped his mouth.
“Told you,” said Larkin.
“It’s fine,” he squeaked. “Fine!”
“Like Kyran’s hell it’s fine,” Jacque grumbled, flipping her sword in her hand. “Larkin’s right; only a mad person would do that to themselves. And if she’s mad, who’s to say she won’t be giving us bony little additions in our sleep? Mad and magical is a dangerous combination. Too dangerous. If we don’t stifle this behavior right now, we might have to kill her ourselves.”
“Ilona’s breath, Jacque, you’re not killing anyone. And put your sword away!” Larkin ordered through gritted teeth.
Jacque begrudgingly obliged.
Elf waved at them. “I hope someone grabbed my bag!”
Casseem held it up, grimacing. “Right here.”
Elf studied them, her face brightening with understanding. “Oh, don’t worry about me.” She reached back, touching one of the bones jutting from her shoulders. “Just an enhancement.”
“Enhancement,” Jacque growled, trudging forward.
As they began their hike through the forest, Larkin kept a close eye on Elf, noting that she wasn’t acting deranged. Elf led the group, stepping lightly even as blood leaked from the wounds in her back.
The forest seemed to stretch on forever, pure wilderness within the Reach’s depths. The luminescent fuzz that had fallen off the trees floated in a sheet of low-hanging fog. The beauty was coaxing Larkin to let her guard down, but she had to remain vigilant.
Tamsyn let out a string of swears to Ilona.
Larkin spun around, scanning the immediate area for any signs of stalking creatures.
But Tamsyn’s eyes were glued to his new map.
“Holy. Hells.” He knelt in the middle of the path.
Larkin dropped her bag and hurried to him. “What is it?”
“I may be onto something,” he said.
As the rest of the party crowded around Tamsyn, he slowly spun their new map of the Reach on top of the old, as if trying to align them a certain way. No … He wasn’t trying to align their new map with their old map.
He was aligning it to a map of the Surface.
“My dimensions for the new map are off, so it may be hard to imagine.” He traced his finger around the outer edge of the Reach, and then lifted the parchment, doing the same to the Surface map. “See the shape of the isle? It’s roughly the same on both maps. Right now we’re at the very outskirts of the Reach, which is beneath the west bay.”
On the Reach map, Tamsyn dragged his finger down the underground river. “We’re about to head inland, to Kyran’s sector.” Tamsyn pressed his finger atop the Passage of the Damned, and then lifted the Reach map to show the Surface map beneath.
Casseem swore.
Kyran’s sector was right beneath the capital.
“This entire time he’s been below us?” The question left Larkin in a whisper. “But the capital mines…”
“Kyran’s sector must be below the mines,” said Tamsyn.
“That’s not possible,” said Jacque.
Larkin felt like weeping. They’d traveled for miles, witnessed so much death. Devon. Brielle. Bianca and her villagers. And Kyran had been right beneath Larkin’s feet from the start of the destruction.
Amias’s hand rested on her shoulder. “We couldn’t have known.”
Larkin leaned her head against his arm, exhausted.
Elf hovered over the rest of them. “This is good news, isn’t it? It means when we find him, the journey home won’t be so long.”
“If we can find a way up,” said Larkin.
“We have magic.” Elf shifted one of her bony growths.
“First we have to kill him.” Tamsyn rolled up the map, pointing the parchment forward. “River’s close.”
As they neared the edge of the forest, Casseem and Elf each lit a torch, dousing the tops with oil to keep them lit. A curtain of mist washed over them as they entered a corridor of sweating walls. Larkin’s curls fell limp around her cheeks, and condensation dripped into her eyes. She squinted, making out a decline in the path and the shape of a trickling riverbed ahead of them. While the walls sluiced, the bed was only a dribbling creek.
“This is the river that’s supposed to lead us to Kyran, right?” Larkin asked. “The one on the map.”
“Yes,” said Tamsyn, disappointed.
“I thought that we would be able to, well, float down it.” Casseem wiped the moisture from his face.
Tamsyn made to grab the journal from his pack, and then stopped, clearly realizing that moisture and paper did not go well together. “Maybe the tides of the ocean affect the water level.”
“So we’ll have to walk. At least we’re on the right path.” Jacque looked to their left and right. “Which way?”
Tamsyn pointed to the left, and they began their trek.
Camping in this will be a nightmare, thought Larkin. Fifty miles, Tamsyn had said. They’d traveled ten. Forty miles was three days’ worth of walking with the very best of luck.
It was obvious that the others were thinking the same thing, gloom hanging over the party like the ever-present mist. Even Elf’s spirits seemed dampened.
“There’s something up ahead.” Casseem hurried forward, Larkin following closely behind him.
A large crag three times Larkin’s height jutted from the center of the water. As they neared, the shape softened to a woman carved of stone, and Larkin halted.
The woman was robed and hooded, her face solemn, eyes shut. A chain wound over her shoulders and down her kneeling body, pinning her arms to her torso. Larkin shivered at the thought of an artist creating something so purposeful in a place so desolate. The rock wasn’t stained, and no lichen grew upon it.
Larkin sensed Tamsyn’s awe as he approached. “She hasn’t been here long,” he murmured.
“Who is it?” Amias asked.
“The robes indicate a disciple,” said Tamsyn. “But I don’t know which one.”
The woman didn’t resemble Bianca, though Bianca’s appearance may have shifted over the years. Larkin had no way of knowing. There were more statues beyond, lining the side of the tunnel, only shapes in the absence of light.
Larkin took Casseem’s torch from him. She stepped around the kneeling woman and walked farther down the tunnel. The creek diverged into even shallower streamlets and disappeared into crevices in the rock face. Her sodden boots crunched against wet gravel, her light rolling along the figures of two more women and three men, all robed and hooded. These disciples stood, and they weren’t wrapped in chains.
Larkin smelled iron.
Don’t be stupid, she thought. She’d grown far too familiar with the stench of blood. The statue of the final woman was covered in it, fresh enough to glisten.
“Whose blood is that?” Casseem asked as he approached.
“We passed through a tunnel made of corpses. Take your pick.” Larkin reached out and touched the statue, the crimson sticky against her fingers. It didn’t matter whose blood it was. It was meant to send a message.
“Bianca,” said Tamsyn.
He was right. Beneath the blood, Larkin could see the stark resemblance. The meaning was clear.
One disciple down.
“Is this part of the river within a sector?” Larkin asked.
“Not from what I remember,” said Tamsyn. “Do you think Kyran’s sending a message to the other disciples, warning them?”
“Maybe.” Larkin wiped her hand on her pants. “Or it’s a message to us.”
“He’s warning the other disciples—or us—that they’ll die if they help us.” Amias rubbed his arms, shivering.
Larkin was certain he was right. The other disciples wouldn’t pass through the river often, if at all. Not if they were devoted to remaining within their sectors like Bianca.
She glanced back at the kneeling stone woman. “Rahele Ekko didn’t have a sector of her own. Does this mean she’s chained to one of the other disciples?”
“Or Kyran,” said Tamsyn.
Larkin shuddered.
“We should set up camp here.” Elf pranced through the aisle, spinning on her toes. “These statues have stories to tell. We need more time with them to know their secrets.”
“Statues don’t speak,” Jacque said bluntly. “And I don’t want to be around them any longer than we have to.”
“I want to take some time to search the area at the very least, make sure we don’t miss something.” Tamsyn pointed, plucking the torch from Larkin’s hand. “Like that.”
Larkin followed his finger, spotting glyphs written upon the wall past the statues.
“Careful,” Larkin warned. “If Kyran wrote them—”
“I don’t think he did.” Tamsyn hurried toward the glyphs. “Remember the ones back at the mining settlement?”
“I’ll see if I can find lichen for a fire,” said Amias.
“It’s too wet to light anything.” Jacque followed him down the channel. Elf trailed along without the slightest bit of concern for her blood-soaked back.
Larkin’s shoulders sagged as she rubbed her forehead. They could be walking right into a trap. The tunnel of corpses, the statues. She’d once seen a child throwing stale crumbs at a pigeon in the market square, giggling with glee when the pigeon followed the trail. The girl was thrilled by how easily she could control the bird.
Was Kyran gleeful? She didn’t know. She sensed nothing here. Perhaps that was a good sign.
They could defy his wishes and run to a different sector in the hopes another disciple would help them. Maybe the others were stronger than Bianca and her villagers. Maybe they were waiting for the right moment to rise up.
Or they’d steal Larkin’s flesh and bones for themselves. The other disciples were content with being immortal, weren’t they? If not, they would have let themselves die already.
