Alchemised, page 65
Alister touched them with his fingers. “All clear,” he said, flicking the wires so they’d vibrate back down.
The anchors came loose, slithering into the darkness after Penny like a pair of serpents. The rest of them followed. Helena and Purnell, without their own armour and harnesses, were deadweight in the literal sense. Alister took Helena with him, and Sebastian carried Purnell, and the water poured down on them like a waterfall. They were soaked to the bone, nearly numb by the time they reached the bottom. It was too loud to hear anything but water crashing down, echoing off the walls with a cacophonous roar.
Alister was shaking with cold, but he knelt down, putting his hands underwater for several minutes.
“It’s shallow along the edges but about ten feet left, there’s a drop, and the water’s fast. I can’t feel the bottom.” He had to shout to be heard. “If we go straight, it should be fine, but let’s anchor a line before we cross. I’ll go first, I know the safest route.”
Once they reached the far wall, there was a ladder leading to an upper walkway that ran above the dozens of huge tunnels feeding into the cathedral. Helena used her vivimancy to warm everyone, but there was nothing to be done about their soaking clothes except to keep moving.
Penny took the lead again. She’d memorised the route through all the tunnels that wound bewilderingly. She had a slight limp from an old injury, but she was still quick and light-footed. She moved forward, checking the route, making sure things were clear before using her torch to signal the rest of them forward.
They did not encounter a single necrothrall.
Helena’s dread grew.
They climbed an endless ladder that connected to a tunnel, and after crawling so long that Helena began to wonder if she’d ever see light again, they emerged into a basement.
“Wait here,” Soren said.
Penny leaned against a wall. She was breathing hard, stooped over, her hand pressing against her knee.
“Let me see,” Helena said. There’d been a torn ligament—it had been healed, but she should have been on bedrest for a few days and then worked slowly back into active duty.
“I’m fine, I’ll get fixed up again once we get back,” Penny said, but Helena could tell she wouldn’t.
There was a muffled shout, the quick snick of steel, and a thud. Soren’s head popped back through the doorway to those waiting in the basement. “Clear,” he said softly.
They ascended three floors. Helena had never seen Luc’s unit in actual combat, only their practices. They were deadly. Dark blurs of steel and spilled blood. Their weapons morphed like water in their hands, the blades twisting and altering, reaching out and slaughtering anything that crossed their paths, using their harnesses to make gravity-defying attacks.
The prison was unquestionably occupied. There were too many guards and necrothralls for it to be abandoned, but not as many as would be expected for keeping Luc prisoner.
Helena kept telling herself it wasn’t a trap, but it felt like one. They moved fast, trying to search every room before their victims were discovered and the alarms went off. There was no point in hiding the bodies; Soren left a trail of blood in his wake.
Alister was defence. He had spectacular resonance reach. He could throw up a wall, or shove back attackers by moving the ground under them. He’d hang back and queue them so that Sebastian and Soren could kill methodically without getting crowded or overrun in the narrow hallways.
Penny, no longer scouting, acted as Alister’s cover, protecting him from any attacks.
They checked every room. Cell after cell. No Luc. No prisoners at all. The place seemed empty. Except there were guards.
They finally found a prisoner in the last cell in the block. A huddled figure under a blanket.
“Luc?” Soren’s voice was ragged with desperation.
The figure lying on the cot stirred, and a grey-haired man lifted his head. When he saw them, his eyes went wide and he lunged towards the bar, jabbering in broken Northern dialect.
“Resistance?”
That was all Helena managed to make out among the many words she didn’t know. He sounded western.
“Save?” The man pointed at himself.
“No,” Soren said, shaking his head. “We’re looking for someone else.”
“Save.” He pointed at himself again.
“We’re only here for one person,” Soren said, already turning.
The man’s eyes narrowed. “Boy?” He touched his own hair. “Gold?”
They all turned back.
“Is he here?” Helena asked.
The man set his jaw. “Save.” He pointed at himself again.
“We don’t have time to drag around a prisoner,” Soren said. “We’ll find him ourselves.”
“No!” The man sounded terrified now.
Helena studied him. “What’s your name?”
“Vagner,” he said slowly.
The name was familiar. Vagner.
Wagner? That was the name Crowther and Ivy had tortured out of Lancaster.
She turned to Soren. “We’ve been looking for him.”
“Helena.” Soren looked at her with exasperation. “We can’t deal with a prisoner.”
“This one is important. Crowther’s had people trying to find him. If this is where they’re hiding the prisoners they don’t want anyone knowing about, that’s all the more evidence this is a prisoner we need.”
Soren hesitated. “If he slows us down or does anything that puts the mission at risk, I will kill him, and you won’t stop me. Agreed?”
Helena nodded.
Luc wasn’t anywhere on that floor. They ascended again. Hope dwindling. Maybe all these guards were just for Wagner, who followed them, cowering behind her and Purnell as though they were human shields.
They turned a corner and found an immense grey-skinned necrothrall standing in front of the door. He smiled.
Not a necrothrall, then, a lich.
“There you are,” he said in a rasping voice, raising a huge spiked club, as his other hand rapped a warning on the door behind him. “I wondered if the remaining Bayards might show up. Two down and two to go.” He paid no attention to Soren, his focus on Sebastian. “That pretty niece of yours made a sound like a rotten gourd when I ran her through. You should have seen how fast your Principate dropped his sword when she fell.”
Sebastian stilled Soren. “Who are you?”
The lich smiled again, the corpse’s bloated lips splitting into a rotten grin. “Don’t you recognise me, Sebastian? I’d think you would, after all the effort you and Apollo put into executing me. Afraid it didn’t stick. Not like the axe did when I split your brother’s skull.”
“Atreus,” Sebastian said, his voice soft, but his grip on his weapon tightening.
Helena stared in horror. Kaine’s father was still alive?
Before she could process the revelation, both paladins attacked, and Atreus swung at them. The wall exploded, tile and stone flying, dust filling the air. The hallway was narrow, a tiny combat space in which speed was a far greater advantage than size and muscle. If Atreus landed a blow, he would have killed Sebastian and Soren, but he had to hit them. They were faster, slicing at him a dozen times before he could raise the club and give it momentum.
The other wall cracked open as Atreus swung again.
The air was so thick with dust, it was almost impossible to see anything but the gleam of metal. There was a horrifying crunch and squelch and something came flying through the debris and hit the ground. The lich’s head.
“Come on,” Soren’s voice barked from amid the choking dust. The rest of them moved forward. Soren was favouring his right arm and Sebastian was bleeding at the temple, but they were mostly unscathed. The huge corpse that had been Atreus Ferron lay at their feet, gouged all over with deep wounds that would have killed anyone who wasn’t already dead.
“Shouldn’t we get the talisman?” Helena asked as they all stepped around it.
“There’s no time to search a corpse that big,” Soren said as he stumbled forward and shoved the door open.
There was Luc.
They all froze.
He was strapped down on a medical table, a mask fitted over his nose and mouth attached to several tubes. There was a cluster of people around him, swathed in surgical gowns.
His torso had been sliced open, peeled back to expose all the organs, but they were blackened, almost necrotic.
“Fuck!” said a woman’s voice, and she glanced over towards them.
They were clearly trying to finish what they’d been doing when Atreus knocked to warn them.
Two people lunged across the floor and through a door on the far side without a backwards glance, leaving the rest.
The room exploded into violence.
Soren had been waiting for this moment. He shot across the room, his weapon sweeping into a long curving blade. He killed everyone violently. There was nothing quick or clean about it. Warm blood spattered across her face as Helena went for Luc.
Despite being strapped down, his hands had been pierced through with spikes of nullium that Helena instantly recognised by the telltale way they were dissolving into his blood.
Her fingers trembled as she reached out, looking for a pulse, not sure if her resonance would work. She pressed her fingers below his jaw and gave a small sob of relief. He was alive. Drugged and cut open, but alive.
She ripped the mask off his face as Purnell twisted a nozzle on the tank, cutting off whatever they’d been using on him.
What had they done?
Her hands shook as she searched for a talisman inside him, but she felt no signs of lumithium or any other metal. His organs were darkened, as if he’d been poisoned with something, but there was no time to try to heal it all.
She closed the incisions, working carefully, aligning everything. Purnell was prying the spikes from his hands, her breath coming out in rapid pants as she struggled to get them loose. There was a stark look of terror starting to creep across the girl’s face.
The veins and arteries in Luc’s arms had been constricted, the gas administered keeping his heartbeat impossibly sluggish. The combination had kept his resonance inactive while allowing the now dead scientists to use their own on him. He was also conscious, but just barely.
Soren and Alister were trying to force open the door that two attackers had attempted to escape through, without success.
Helena worked as fast as she could, speeding up Luc’s metabolism and forcing his damaged kidneys back into action, making his heart beat more rapidly once Purnell had the spikes out. Helena shoved a decoction into her hands, ordering her to wash the wounds and get them wrapped in gauze.
Then her ring burned.
Pain like fire ran up her left hand. She gave a choked gasp as she kept working. The sensation barely faded before it burned again.
“Is he alive?” she dimly heard Soren asking, his voice shaking.
“Yes. Just give me a minute,” she said, touching Luc’s face desperately. “Come on, Luc. Do you hear me?”
Her ring burned again.
Alarms started. A deafening ringing that filled the air.
“We’ve got to go!” Soren yelled over the din. “Fuck. We’ll just carry him.”
“Luc, wake up.” Helena shook him.
They didn’t have the manpower for Luc to be deadweight. There was no way that Helena and Purnell could carry him all the way out if there was fighting.
She had a vial and a needle. Her hands were shaking as she filled a syringe. She’d never used this—epinephrine combined with painkillers and a few other things to jump-start his body into action. If it was too strong, it would kill him. It would all be for nothing.
“Come on,” she muttered, and jabbed it through his chest into his heart.
Luc lurched, giving a sudden gasp as his body jolted into violent consciousness.
Helena saw a flash of sky blue as his eyes cracked open.
“Hel?” he croaked, his voice dry. He reached out, touching her face with his bandaged hand as if he couldn’t believe she was real.
“Yes,” she said, trying not to cry. “We’ve come to take you home.”
His eyes rolled around, searching, skimming past everyone clustered around him. “Where’s—where’s Lila?”
“Headquarters,” Soren said, his voice gruff, “waiting for you.”
Luc stiffened. “Is she really—?”
“She’s alive,” Helena said quickly. “We took care of her. It’s your turn now. Come on.”
Luc gave a shuddering gasp of relief. “They said if I went—they wouldn’t kill her. She was—bleeding—so much. Wouldn’t even let me burn it closed. She’s—she’s all right?”
“She’s alive, getting better,” Helena said. “Come on. Take this. We’ve got to go.”
She pulled him upright and he groaned, clutching at his chest.
“What did they do to me?”
“I don’t know. I’ll fix you better once we’re safe,” she said, breaking a tablet in half and pushing it past his lips. She just had to hope he was still strong enough that everything she was doing wouldn’t kill him. “Hold still.”
She pressed her hands on each side of his neck, and used the dissolving tablets to manipulate his physiology, getting his internal systems working the way they needed to.
He’d crash terribly once it all wore off, but she’d be there. She could make up all the difference once they were safe.
“Up now,” she said. He was breathing too fast; she could feel his heart racing dangerously. She tried to slow it a little, but the more conscious he became, the more he comprehended their danger.
She pulled one of his arms over her shoulder and Purnell took the other, and they dragged him to his feet.
“You came…” Luc said, slumping heavily on her.
“You’re my best friend,” Helena said, staring ahead. “Of course I did. Come on. We need to get you out.”
He kept tripping over his feet, his body bearing down so hard that her knees nearly buckled. She was grateful he was not in armour, or she didn’t know how they’d manage. The floor was slick with blood and gore.
“You shouldn’t be here. You’re not—trained,” he said when they were halfway down a flight of stairs.
“Helping you is exactly what I’m trained for,” she said.
Her ring kept burning, again and again. She ignored it.
She had been afraid that after all the fighting to get there, Soren and the others would be too exhausted to keep going, but recovering Luc had reinvigorated them.
However secret the prison had been, it was not so secret that there weren’t plenty of necrothralls now that the alarms had gone off. Not shoddy, damaged necrothralls that shambled and ravaged carelessly; these greys were expertly reanimated, so capable it was hard to believe they were dead except they kept coming no matter how Soren and Sebastian sliced them apart. The narrowness of the hallways and tight corners was both gift and curse.
“I need a weapon,” Luc said, trying to pull away from Helena as Soren was slammed against the wall and crumpled. A necrothrall nearly took his head off, but Sebastian rammed into it, buying Soren enough time to scramble to his feet and decapitate it.
He was fighting left-handed, his right arm cradled against his body.
The drugs were taking effect. Luc was strong enough to resist Helena’s attempts to hold him back and alert enough to realise how outnumbered they were. Still she tried to stop him.
“Luc, you’re injured. I’m not even sure how much. You’re just not feeling it.”
“I’m not watching them die.” He tried again to shove her and Purnell off.
She dug her fingers into his arms. “Luc, you don’t have resonance.”
“Then heal me again later,” he said, finally ripping himself free and throwing himself into the fight. He kicked a necrothrall so hard his foot went through its chest. He snatched up its sword.
Soren called him several names, but there was no time to do more than curse as they kept fighting their way down.
Helena pulled out a knife when they reached the basement. Wagner was huddling behind Purnell as if he expected her to protect him. Purnell’s eyes were wide, the whites glaring with visible panic as she clutched back. They shouldn’t have brought her. The girl was beginning to fall apart. She didn’t have the nerve for combat.
They got into the room and blocked the door, but it was barely secured before the whole wall shook. They fled into the tunnels, scrambling after one another into the sewers, trying to reach the flood cathedral. Alister brought up the rear, crushing and sealing the tunnel behind them, step after step, so that pursuit would be slow.
They reached one of the larger tunnels and paused, gasping for breath.
“You’re not supposed to be fighting, you moron,” Soren said, slumping against the wall. In torchlight, he’d turned very grey and his nose was broken, blood streaming down his mouth and chin.
Purnell was crouched on the ground, rocking and muttering, Mummy? Mummy, please don’t, over and over.
“Don’t tell me what to do,” Luc said, breathing hard, shifting his grip on the sword. “This sword is shit. You could have brought a weapon for me. Do you have my rings at least?”
“You don’t have resonance,” Helena snapped.
Luc grimaced but gripped the sword harder.
“I don’t know how Lila’s never killed you,” Soren said, pushing himself up but looking ready to topple over.
“Hold on.” Helena went over and checked him. His arm was broken again. Three times in a year. It was unlikely to ever heal properly after this. She aligned the bones again and fused them.
“Do you have something for pain?” Penny asked in a small voice. “Or maybe you could block off some nerves.”
