Bloodwitch (19 page)

It would be hard to believe that Malachi could pale any more, yet I was seeing it. He seemed to become nearly transparent as he nodded silently.

“The lower cells are empty,” Mistress Jeshickah said. “That should be a comfortable enough space for you two to work in.”

Malachi’s gaze rose swiftly, and he protested, “Vance won’t survive down there.”

“I can’t imagine how you intend to work on this problem without studying its origin. If you’re concerned for Vance’s health, you had best work quickly.”

“I doubt you’ll let me look at the trainers, but it might help if I examined one of the ill bleeders.”

There were words I wanted to say and questions I wanted to ask and screams building up in me, but I could not make a sound as I followed them to the last door in the hall. During my tour Jaguar had said only,
This is … also none of your concern, because it will always be locked. This is a working building, Vance
.

Knowing now what “work” the trainers did, I knew what I would see even before we stepped through the doors. We descended steep stairs, then came to a room with rough stone walls and a dirt floor.

If the cold, slick marble room behind Jaguar’s room had been bad, this place was infinitely worse. I could
feel
the aura of despair pushing in from all sides.

Or maybe it’s just my own
.

I missed Mistress Jeshickah leaving. She was simply gone. She hadn’t disappeared; my mind had blanked out for a few moments. I was having trouble thinking and following what was going on. Like the loose, crumbling mortar in the walls, my world seemed to be turning to dust and revealing all sorts of sharp edges and hidden evils.

I remembered Malachi saying once that “they” had been very careful with me.

I understood what he had meant now. Even after I had been exposed to the brutality that was apparently commonplace in Midnight, I had been sheltered from the idea that I could ever be the victim. They had worked so hard to convince me that everything I saw was necessary. Inevitable.

Malachi was at the door, examining it, but eventually he admitted, “This is not a lock I can trip. It’s warded magically.”

“Are you a witch or not?” I asked. “You obviously have magic, but you told Mistress Jeshickah that she needed a witch, as if you weren’t one.”

“I’m a little bit of a lot of things, but not much of a healer,” he said. “And you’re stuck here with me, unless we can buy our way out by saving the lives of the trainers.”

“Are you going to?” I asked. Given the way he felt about Midnight, he might choose to die first.

“If Jeshickah were sick, I’d kill myself and you before they could try to break us, and hope that with her death Midnight might fall,” Malachi said. “I
should
probably refuse to help anyway, out of principle, but you may have noticed that my principles are a little less honorable than that. Losing the trainers will weaken Midnight, but Jeshickah has made it clear that she will simply create more.”

“Would she really go after your family?” I asked.

“In a heartbeat. Metaphorically speaking, since she doesn’t have one.”

“What prophecy is she talking about?” I asked. Visions of the future had been common in Lady Brina’s myths, but I hadn’t thought they existed in the real world.

“My prophecy,” he answered. “One that I have been doing everything in my power to bring to fruition. When I
was a small child, I had a vision of my sister on the serpiente throne, with a king who refused to bow to Midnight as Midnight burned.”

I could understand how the vision could be understood in two ways. A king who refused to bow to the empire might help bring about its downfall. Or, if Mistress Jeshickah followed through with her threats, a king who was already one of the leaders of Midnight would not need to bow to it.

“
Can
you heal them?”

“I have no idea.”

No matter what Malachi said, or even what I saw, I didn’t really want the trainers to die—partially because of Mistress Jeshickah’s threats, but also because I didn’t think I could stand it.

I had seen the darkness. There had been moments when even Jaguar made my skin crawl, or when he looked past me as if I were so far beneath his notice that I might as well not have been there. I had seen instants of anger and irritation quickly subsumed beneath his placid, affable mask. I had seen Lady Brina’s rage and Mistress Jeshickah’s calm viciousness. I had seen the way Elisabeth had flinched away from Taro in fear. And of course there had been those “experiments.”

But they were my world, my parents and guardians and teachers. I had been raised to love them, and even if my
mind could now see the evil within and my common sense told me not to trust and not to have hope, my heart wasn’t quite ready to let go.

Malachi and I explored the confines of our prison. The door to the outside was heavy wood with a raw finish, lacking a doorknob or latch on this side. The walls were rough gray-black stone, held together with mortar—except for one side, which was solid stone, with iron rings and hooks set into it at intervals.

There was one more doorway, which led to a small and cramped but clean washroom.

“Jeshickah is fanatical about cleanliness,” Malachi said as he examined the running-water facilities, which seemed so out of place in a hole like this. “She uses technology humans forgot centuries ago when Rome fell, combined with every scrap of science they discover now. Granted, it keeps her human stock healthy most of the time, but the level of obsession makes me wonder what she experienced as a human.”

Jaguar had admitted to me that he had been born human, and that Mistress Jeshickah must also have been, but I still wasn’t able to picture her as anything other than the indomitable creation she was now.

I prowled around the main room uselessly. Malachi seemed to be looking for something, and I echoed his movements, but I found nothing but more evidence of horror.

The walls and floor had been splashed and soaked with
dark liquid, probably on numerous occasions. I knelt down and reached out to touch, but then stopped. I did not have to stretch my imagination far to guess that the stains had been left by blood.

“What do we do now?” I asked Malachi.

Malachi took one last look around the cell, sighed, and then sat with his legs crossed. “I’ll go into a trance and see if I can trace any patterns of magic connecting you to the trainers,” he said.

“And if you can?”

“Then—” He broke off with a choked sound of frustration. “Vance, I have
no idea
how a bloodwitch’s magic usually works, or how a poison spell like this might. I don’t know if I will find power connecting you to the trainers, or if I could break such a connection if I found it, or if breaking it would even
help
. So I’m going to start small and see what there is to see.”

“How?”

“Sit with me.”

I sat in front of him, mirroring his position. “What now?”

“Close your eyes.”

I did as instructed and felt him take my hands in his, so his thumbs rested over the pulse points in my wrists.

Let your mind wander. You don’t need to focus on anything in particular
.

How did he talk in my head that way? Did that thought
count as something particular or as wandering? I had no idea what I was supposed to be doing.

Mostly I fidgeted, until Malachi finally took his hands away. I opened my eyes to see him shaking his head.

“Damn it,” he whispered. “Your power is too different from mine. I can’t make any sense of it, or tell if something isn’t working the way it’s supposed to. Maybe I’ll be able to do more by looking at one of the sick humans. Any magic in them would have to be foreign.”

I stood up slowly and discovered that my legs ached from sitting on the hard ground. How long would we be locked in here?

Malachi stood up after me and then put a hand out to catch himself on the wall. Bowing his head, he whispered, “Sorry. It sometimes takes a while to ground myself again.”

I walked as far away as I could, trying to give him space, but there wasn’t much space to be had. I pressed my hands against the smooth, cold wall and then stepped forward to rest my cheek against it as well. The cold was nice. The air felt too hot. It was stifling.

“Malachi—”

“Give me a minute, Vance.”

“Okay.”

I paced back and forth. I could only take a couple of steps in each direction. I couldn’t even stretch my legs properly. I went into the washroom and put my hands under the water, but it was lukewarm.

Like blood
.

I wished I had a towel to dry my hands.

I returned to the cell, where Malachi was kneeling with his body bent forward so his forehead and palms were against the dirt floor. Whatever he had tried to do had obviously taken a lot out of him, and I didn’t want to bother him, but I also didn’t want to just stand around doing nothing.

I dragged my hands over the rough fieldstones, scraping my palms hard enough that the pain made me shudder. It also helped calm me. I was being silly, a scared little bird. I had to be stronger than this.

WHEN THE DOOR
opened I was sitting calmly in the corner, focusing on my breathing and letting my mind go quiet. In my head I wasn’t in that cell. I was in the forest. Not the forest I had walked through with Malachi or ridden in with Taro and Jaguar; the trees in my mind were larger, lush and vibrant, with flowers in colors I had never seen even in Brina’s paintings.

Mistress Jeshickah’s boot heels made dull clunks on the earth floor. Two humans followed behind her. One was a young man who was pale from lack of sunlight but still seemed healthy. His brown hair was clean, and his green eyes were clear … and yet they seemed strangely flat when he looked at me. Was that the illness, or something else? Maybe it was related to the semiconscious woman he was
carrying. Her hair was matted and hanging in her face, which was flushed with heat even though she was shivering.

“They both have it,” Mistress Jeshickah said as Malachi and I lifted our heads, pulling our minds back to our bodies. “The girl is at the height of the fever stage. It will pass within the hour. The boy is near the end of the dormant stage. He will be fine for another few hours, until sunset.”

“Is that how long the dormant stage lasts,” Malachi asked, “or does the change always happen at sundown?”

“Always at sundown,” she replied.

“These two are both completely human to begin with?”

“Yes.”

“I might need tools,” Malachi said, speaking quickly, as if he was concerned she would leave before he could finish. “Azteka magic depends on bloodletting. A blade could be useful.”

Mistress Jeshickah drew a dagger from a sheath at her waist and handed it to him, obviously unafraid that he might turn it on her.

Malachi took it and then leaned back so his head thunked against the dirt. “If you were a little less evil, you might have a
qualified
witch who you trusted do this.”

“I tried being kind and trusting,” Mistress Jeshickah replied. “My subjects became arrogant and turned on me. It is indeed better to be feared than loved.”

She walked out, closing the door and locking us in
again, this time with two sick humans and no more hope than before.

“Bring her here,” Malachi said to the slave.

He laid the unconscious woman down in front of Malachi. “She has not been able to stay awake,” he said.

“That’s fine,” Malachi answered. “I work better through dreams, anyway.”

He put a hand on her sweaty brow and closed his eyes, his body going impossibly still.

“What’s your name?” I asked the other man.

“Joseph.”

“I’m Vance.”

He nodded, but his eyes never lost that strange emptiness, even when he looked straight at me.

“How many people are sick?” I asked.

“Not many now,” he answered. “Eight, if she is the last.”

Eight still seemed like a lot. It had only been a couple weeks. “After the dormant stage, how long does it take people to recover?”

“Pardon?”

“There’s the fever, and then the disease goes dormant,” I said. “Right? And then what happens? You said not many now, so how long does it take people to recover?”

“The fever returns,” he answered, with no emotion in his voice. “The throat turns black here,” he said, gesturing to the spot on his throat over the pulse, where the vampires
would have fed, “and then it spreads out like blood poisoning. At least, in the bleeders it starts in the throat. We think one of the cleaning crew picked it up when scrubbing blood from one of the cells. Her hands blackened first. In one of the healers, it started in her knee, we think from where she knelt in the blood while working on someone down here. In the slave from the stables, it spread from the wounds on his chest. He was first, but we assumed it was a normal infection caused by his wounds.”

The slave from the stables
. Felix. He was talking about Felix. None of the vampires would have fed on him while he was working in the stables, but I remembered reaching out, drawn by his blood. I had touched it, before coming to my senses.