Authors: Kelly McCullough
“Is that good or bad?” asked Faran.
“Hopefully good.” If it signaled the absence of a lurking Hand and not clever restraint on such a lurker’s part. “But there’s only one way to find out.” I shucked out of the pack holding the swords and passed it to Faran. “Block the light from the door.” I wanted it as dark as I could make it before I started down.
Faran complied, filling the space with her shroud as I stepped onto the first stair.
Fast or slow, Triss?
Slow might be smarter, but I don’t think we have the time.
I don’t either.
Which is why I’d removed my pack.
This is going to hurt.
I reached through our link to borrow Triss’s senses, but left him in full control and sent,
You can be my eyes.
The choice would impede my ability to perform magic, but it had other compensations.
Understood.
I shifted my sword into an underhand grip—less likely to accidentally stab myself that way—and dove headfirst down the stairs. I aimed down instead of out, staying low, and mostly skidded along on my chest until I hit the soldier’s corpse, which tipped me into a roll. The entire front side of my body was screaming at me as I came to my feet in a low crouch just beyond the foot of the stairs.
I had at least one possibly cracked rib, but I couldn’t afford to stay still. I immediately dove into a second roll, and then a third, moving down the narrow hall toward the nearest junction.
Soldier, on your right, hiding in the arch, six feet forward.
Though we were both sharing the same unvision, I simply wasn’t aware of the soldier until Triss pointed him out to me. Which was exactly why I’d chosen not to take control this time.
Triss “sees” in every direction equally and thinks that way, too. I never will, though years of training and practice have taught me how to interpret what comes in through Triss’s otherworldy senses via a sort of spot-sampling technique. For me it will always be like translating from a fundamentally alien language, whereas Triss speaks it as his native tongue. He can make sense of it far better than I ever will.
As I came out of my third roll, I flipped my sword around to a front grip and straight on from there into a backhanded lunge that took the soldier through the throat.
Drop!
Triss yelled into my mind. I threw myself at the floor as a burst of lightning from the side passage passed through the place I had occupied only a moment before.
Storm right, Hand left!
Triss yelled into my mind.
Then my shroud was suddenly gone as he collapsed into dragon form and leaped from my back to meet the oncoming Storm. That was the last I had leisure to pay attention to him, as a spear stabbed down at me from the left. I managed to avoid a skewering by rolling toward the spearman. But I didn’t have enough room to dodge the thrust completely, and I felt the edge of the blade open a shallow gash along my right hip.
I swung my sword at my attacker’s ankles, but he jumped back beyond the reach of my swing, pulling his spear back as he went.
Must be my day for facing death from above,
I thought as I braced my feet on the wall and kicked myself over into a backward roll. A spray of icy rain splashed across the back of my neck from the place where shadow fought Storm behind me when I came up onto my feet.
I barely had time to register it as the spearman lunged in again, this time with a thrust at my belly. A cross body parry deflected the spear a few critical inches so that it ripped a hole in my shirt instead of my side. I turned sideways to present the spear-wielding Hand with a narrower target, extending my sword forward and down in a high guard.
He stabbed at me again, going for my eyes. This time I had the leisure to make a much more careful parry, following on with a riposte at his forward hand—the only part of him I could easily reach. But the hand is a difficult target, and he neatly avoided my slice. The narrow confines of the hall and his much longer weapon gave him a brutal advantage unless I could get inside his guard.
Triss?
Though I could feel through our link that he was heavily engaged, I wanted to check how he was doing and didn’t dare turn to look.
Busy! Handle it.
Right. When the spear came at me again, I jumped forward with my parry, trying to beat the point aside and get in close before he could withdraw it. But my opponent was no tyro. Now that I was on my feet he’d shifted to a more careful sort of short thrust. That allowed him to easily hop back and put his point between me and where I needed to go. I drew the dagger at my left hip to give me a second weapon both for block and attack, but the next couple of quick passes ended with much the same result as that first. If I’d had a heavier sword, I might have been able to use it to hack the spear apart, but I didn’t.
As we were dancing back and forth, I got the chance to study my opponent. He was tall, almost too tall for the low passages of the crypt, but not quite. As well as slender and well muscled. His loose Hand’s robes hung open, exposing partial armor—a cuirass and vambraces as well as shin plates on his boots. About the only good thing I could say about the situation was that we were both too separated from our familiars to make any use of magic. Otherwise, he’d probably have cooked me by then. I tried a couple of attacks, cuts high and low but he easily deflected them without offering me any openings.
Apparently that raised his confidence, because he laughed, “I sent my men to kill your fellows when the crypt door opened, Blade. All I need to do is keep you here for a few short minutes. You’re too late already.”
Fuck. If his goal was to provoke me into doing something desperate and risky, he’d just succeeded. Now we would see how that worked out for him. After I made my next parry, I raised my sword into a high guard again to give me chopping room. Then, I edged my left foot forward until it offered a more tempting target. I wanted him to come in low. He did. Rather than deliver a proper parry, I hopped aside while simultaneously bringing the edge of my blade down as close to in line with his spear shaft as I could, swinging with everything I had.
I hit the spear about six inches behind the head, edge on, with a motion that brought the sword down and back toward me. It was a very precise move and very fast, only possible because I kept my blade sharp enough for shaving, and it worked. My edge sank into the wood and stuck fast. If he’d known it was coming, he could easily have wrenched my sword out of my hand. But by the time he knew what was going on, it was already too late. I’d let go of my blade the second it stuck, and now I leaped forward.
He yanked his spear backward, trying to bring it into line to block my advance, but the trapped sword added a lot of tip weight and threw the balance off completely, twisting the shaft to the side. The effect wouldn’t last long, but it didn’t have to. I just needed long enough to get fully inside his guard, and it accomplished that. He was a veteran, and smart, letting the spear go the instant he realized what I’d done and reaching for his own belt knife. But by then I was on top of him.
I drove my knife deep into the flesh of his thigh, just above his knee, and left it there. As the pain momentarily doubled him up, I brought my now empty left hand up to catch his descending chin. I’d already jabbed a spearfist at his throat with my other hand, but he’d avoided the worst of it, twisting to avoid the blow. That put my right hand next to the ritual cord that bound his ponytail in place. Now I grabbed the knot and yanked at the same time that I twisted with my other hand. His neck broke with a dull wet crack, and thunder rattled the passage as his Storm followed him into death.
“Faran!” I yelled as I retrieved my blade. “Bring the swords!”
There was no response, and I spared a moment to worry about that, but only a moment. If the Hand hadn’t been lying to me, the prisoners might already be dying.
I didn’t see her,
Triss sent as he followed the line that connected us back to rejoin me in my mad dash down the hall.
She can take care of herself,
I sent.
Better than you can, in many ways, but that doesn’t prevent me worrying.
Me either.
A metallic snap sounded ominously from around a corner in the hallway ahead. It was followed by a flare of light so intense that it burned. Wincing at the brightness I leaped around the corner to find a pair of soldiers standing between me and an iron door pried off its hinges. The light spilled through from whatever lay within.
The closer of the two held a broken sword, the farther a spear. A heart thrust killed the swordsman in the same instant my thrown knife took the spearwoman in the eye. It hadn’t killed her—thrown blades rarely do, but she screamed and dropped her weapon, reaching for the knife. A palm strike to the back of her clutching hands drove the blade deep and finished the job, though it would take her a little while to figure it out.
I went past her falling body and through the door into the narrow tomb beyond. The light was almost unbearably bright, despite the soldier who had preceded me blocking the worst of it. All I could see was the silhouette of a head and shoulders, but that was all I needed to drive my sword into the back of his neck. He fell like a string-cut puppet, exposing me to the direct assault of the light.
My shroud dissolved as the light forced Triss to collapse back down into my regular shadow to protect himself, and the brilliance of it stabbed at my dark-adjusted eyes. I staggered a half step back at the sudden pain and had to throw up my free arm to cover my face.
“Who’s there?” the voice was weak, barely a croak and totally unidentifiable, but it galvanized me into action and I began to grope around for the light. “It’s Aral. Who am I talking to?
“Loris,” and this time I could hear the pain as well as the weakness. “Jax?”
“Alive and well last time I saw her, but that was before this whole play blew up in our faces.” My groping fingers found a metal rod hanging from the ceiling.
I slid my hand down the rod. As I reached the knob on the end the light dimmed. It was vibrating ever so slightly—in tune with the storm above—as was the floor now that I thought about it. If it got much worse it’d tear the whole abbey apart stone by stone. The cell stank of blood and piss and all the other horrible smells of torture and imprisonment.
“. . . ’s trap,” said Loris. “She shouldn’t have . . .
you
shouldn’t be here.”
“I know.” I closed my hand around the magelight, darkening the room enough to allow me to open my eyes. My fist glowed red and I could see Loris hanging limp on a wooden framework at the back of the tomb. “She told me. I came anyway.” I gave a yank on the rod, but nothing happened.
Summoning Triss to edge my sword in shadow, I snapped it around and cut the rod loose from the ceiling. Then I shoved the light under the body of the Sword at my feet. The light leaking out from underneath was still plenty to see by, but it was dim enough to allow Triss to slip back into dragon shape beside me.
Loris looked awful, naked and covered in bruises, bleeding freely from a deep wound in his side and minus his right ear. He was hanging on an elaborate wooden rack built in the shape of a glyph of binding. Heavy leather straps bound him at the wrists, elbows, throat, chest, knees, and ankles. The device was called the pillory of light. It was devised by Tangara, God of Glyphs, to hold captured Blades as a part of the war of Heaven against my goddess. I had spent some time on one a year ago, and the sight of it now set a fire in my blood.
The magelight that I’d just removed was the part that kept his Shade from acting. Now Issaru began to stir, appearing first as a tendril of shadow that reached around to cover Loris’s wound and staunch the bleeding. Another severed the straps at ankles and knees. Loris hissed in pain as limbs that hadn’t moved in who knew how long suddenly changed position. Remembering my own agony in a similar position I was glad that Issaru had the sense not to cut him free all at once.
“Let me help you—” I began, but Loris gave another sharp hiss.
“No. Cut the others loose. Issaru will take care of me.”
“Aral?” the voice came from up the hall behind me, low but urgent. Faran.
“Here.” I turned and went back through the broken door. “With Loris.” For the first time, I noticed the broken-off stem of a heavy key in the door’s lock. “Thank Nam . . .” But she was gone. “There’s luck.”
“Too much luck, I think,” said Triss. My shadow licked out and touched the lock. “This tastes of tampering and . . .”
Before he could say more, Faran appeared at the corner, having dropped the shroud across her face—how long she’d been there I couldn’t say. The bag of swords hung from her left hand.
“We’ve got—”
Before she could finish, there came an incredibly bright flash from behind her, then a boom like a dozen thunder bursts going off all at once. The floor jumped beneath me, and a wall of pressure and dust came shooting around the corner from the direction of the flash, turning out all the lights as it knocked me flat. Dull thuds and splintering cracks told of stones falling from the ceiling around us. The temple was collapsing.
17
S
pend
enough time in darkness and you will discover that it has every bit as much variation as light does. The absolute blackness that surrounded me now had a soft weight to it, like lying under a blanket with six inches of sand pressing it down.
The air felt thick and hard to breathe, almost syrupy, heavy with mold and the stink of ancient stonework. I couldn’t hear a thing. Not with my ears at least, though there was a buzzing in my mind that grew into words as I focused on it.
Aral! Aral, wake up!
It was Triss, but his mental voice felt as though it was coming from a terribly long way away. It had a sort of moist echo to it, like someone yelling in the depths of a sewer.
I’m all right.
I tried to get an idea of my immediate surroundings from Triss’s senses, but it felt like that part of our connection had temporarily closed down.
At least, I think I am. What happened? Where are we?
I’m not sure yet. The big flash stunned me and now I can’t see. I can still feel the hammering of the storm though—it makes the whole world shake—so we can’t have been out too long.
I tried to move, but felt that same heavy resistance I had before. This time, I pushed against it, trying to force myself upright—discovering only in that moment that I was lying on my stomach. For several long slow beats nothing happened. Then the silence fled before a deep ringing sound and I began to move, almost infinitesimally at first, but with a steadily increasing sureness. As I forced myself onto hands and knees, the ringing was interrupted by a couple of dull clunks, like falling stone. Then it slowly began to fade.
“Aral?” It was Faran, sounding more than half frantic.
“’M all right.”
I felt hands on my shoulders in the same moment that I began to “see” things again through Triss’s senses. I was lying three-quarters buried in a heap of dirt and small to midsize stones—fill the builders had packed in around the crypts and other foundations of the temple. Once I’d rubbed the worst of the dirt out of my eyes I could actually see better that way than through Triss. About half the dim magelights that had illuminated the passage before the collapse had fallen along with various sections of wall. But there was still so much dust in the air that Triss’s unsight was practically blind from all the weird shadow echoes.
“How are you doing?” I asked as I finished clearing my eyes.
“Not bad considering,” replied Faran. “I stayed upright and managed to avoid the worst of the collapse.”
“Good plan, that.” I rubbed the back of my neck where I could feel a nasty bruise rising—at a guess one of the bigger stones had clipped me. “I should probably try it next time a ceiling falls on me.”
“Does it happen to you that often?” asked Faran.
Triss slid down into dragon shape and nodded sadly. “This is at least the fourth or fifth time. You’d think we’d be better at it.”
I took a few steps forward. The passage that used to lead to the surface now ended in a pile of broken stone and rubble about ten feet in front of me. The blockage lay just this side of the corner where Faran had been standing. Behind me, the tunnel continued to another turn, though more wreckage half blocked the way there as well. Not that it mattered. I knew from the maps I’d memorized that there was no way out in that direction either. We were trapped, at least for the moment. Us and . . .
“Loris! You still with us?” I called.
“As much as I was before.” He stuck his head into the hall, then followed it out, using the fallen soldier’s sword like a cane. “What about the others? My students?”
“I don’t know.” I noticed he hadn’t mentioned Jax, but I wasn’t about to bring it up when we didn’t—couldn’t—know anything more about her fate. “I haven’t had a chance to check on the others yet.”
“Why not? And, who’s this?” he asked then, looking more closely, “Faran?”
“Master Loris.” She gave him a small formal bow. “I’m sorry the circumstances of our reunion aren’t happier.”
He gave her a warm smile and shook his head. “I presume you’re part of Aral and Jax’s rescue. All things considered, that ranks pretty high on my auspicious meetings scale.” Then he turned and gave me a much more worried look. “Speaking of which, shouldn’t you be opening doors?”
I nodded. “That and trying to figure a way to get us out of here.” Though nothing came to mind. Dust was still falling from the ceiling here and there in response to the ongoing battering the structure was taking from the storm.
The tomb directly across from Loris’s also had a newly fitted iron door on it, so I moved to that one first. The frame was badly sprung from the collapse and I had my doubts about whether we’d be able to open it in the conventional manner. But it never hurts to try the easy way first. While I was working on that door, Faran handed the bag of swords to Loris and headed for the next one down the line.
“Triss, if you would.”
The shadow of a dragon climbed the door, and poked at the lock with a foreclaw. After a moment, he let out a little hiss.
“Having trouble?”
It’s not that,
he replied mentally.
This lock’s been tampered with. Put a normal key in here and it’s going to fuse the lock and weld itself in place in the process. A shadow on the other hand . . .
The lock opened with a sharp click.
Kelos?
I reached for the handle and gave it a good solid yank. The door didn’t budge.
Has to be.
How recently was he here?
No more than an hour ago, probably less.
Dammit, what’s his game? And how did he get in and out of here past the guards without leaving a shadow trail?
“The door’s stuck,” I added aloud. “Triss, see what you can do.”
I glanced to my right, where Faran had started working on her door. Ssithra had slipped up to whisper something in her ear, and now she gave me the faintest of raised eyebrows, and indicated Loris with a flick of her eyes. I made a cutting motion with my hand out of sight of the older master. Faran shrugged and tapped the lock, sending the phoenix back to its task.
Meanwhile, Triss had risen up to cover a substantial portion of the door, pressing himself flat against the surface, and straining with an effort I could feel through our bond. I knew what was coming, and that it took both time and concentration. So I waited quietly for him to do what was necessary.
Another loud click came from Faran’s lock then. Her door must have fared better than mine, because it opened with a sharp pull. Painfully intense light spilled out through the opening, and Ssithra let out a little shriek of protest before diving behind Faran to hide from the brightness.
“Who’s there?” The feminine voice that came through the opening sounded weak and pained, but angry.
“It’s me, Loris.” He started to limp toward the door. “With Aral and Faran. We’ll have you out of there as soon as we can, Maryam.”
I remembered a shy, quiet young woman with black hair and big eyes. Tall, sweet, and absolute murder with swords or staff. Loris had reached the doorway by then. Though I could see how badly he wanted to go to his student, Loris stopped to one side of the threshold, just beyond the edge of the light pouring across it.
“Faran, kill that for me, please,” he said.
His reluctance to do it himself made me wonder how bad the wound in his side really was—if he didn’t dare let the light force Issaru away from it. . . . Faran pushed forward into the cell, which darkened a moment later. At the same time, I felt the effort Triss had been making crescendo. With a sudden snap of his wings, he contracted down into a tiny spot of absolute blackness. A good-sized section of the door went with him, vanishing into the everdark and leaving a dragon shaped hole into . . .
“Dammit!” No light spilled out of that opening, nor ever would.
“Aral?” Loris turned toward me, with a sick look on his face.
“The whole chamber’s collapsed. Whoever was in here never had a chance.”
Loris nodded and took a deep breath, visibly putting aside his loss. I did the same. We would all mourn when we could, but for now we had to wall away our pain and our worries and keep moving.
Just then, Faran came out of her door with Maryam leaning heavily on her shoulders. The older girl looked much as I remembered, if you didn’t count the huge burn scar that started just below where her right ear had been and spilled down from there across her cheek and neck. Like Loris—or me when I’d been hung on the pillory, for that matter—she’d been stripped naked and was covered in bruises. I cursed bitterly, then headed toward Faran and Maryam, and the next prisoner’s door which lay beyond them.
“Master Aral.” Maryam bowed as much as her position allowed. “What’s the situation? Faran says we’re safe for the moment, but trapped. Give me two minutes and I can fight. Have you a sword for me?”
“We have a pair, over there.” Faran indicated the bag that Loris held. “But you should sit down and catch your breath first. We’ll find you some clothes, too. I know a couple of guards who won’t be needing theirs anymore.”
A hydra slid out from Maryam’s feet to touch three of its noses with the dragon at mine, while its other heads kept watch. “It’s good to see you most honored, Resshath Triss, Master Aral. Maryam is right, we are ready to fight. You need only point us at the enemy.”
“I think we can afford to give you a little time to recover, young Vrass,” replied Triss. “Rest and be ready.”
The hydra bobbed a half dozen nods, then collapsed into Maryam’s shadow as Faran helped the journeyman to a seat on the floor. Her eyes met mine over Maryam’s head and they held tears and a murderous rage that I shared. I paused just long enough to examine the door of Maryam’s cell before moving on to try my luck with the next one.
It was the first fully intact door I’d seen. I wanted to know why no light had spilled around the seams or through the keyhole, in case it turned out to matter for any of the others. It was tightly fitted to an extra-deep set of jambs with a similar set of seals at top and bottom, and a plate had been welded across the back side of the keyhole. The whole had clearly been designed by people who’d had plenty of practice at keeping even a shadow from slipping through the cracks.
The next door frame was sprung as well, but not as badly as the first. That gave me hope for what lay on the other side. Once I’d brushed aside the pile of debris along the bottom of the door to give me a better chance at opening it, I could even see a bit of light leaking through where the twisting of the frame had broken the seal. When I tugged on the handle, the door jiggled in the frame, but I could tell it was going to take some prying to get it loose.
I was looking around for a better tool than one of my daggers as Faran passed me on her way to the last door. A question of some possible importance occurred to me, so I caught her eye.
She paused. “Yes?”
“Why did it take you so long to catch up to me in the crypt?”
“I got hung up at the top of the stairs. You’d just ducked out of sight when a Hand ran in through the same door I’d come in by. She was leaking blood from a big cut over her eye and trailing five Swords behind her. I knew you could handle whatever you ran into down here, so I figured I should get back to my original job and clear the exits. It took me a little while to manage that lot. By the time I had, another Hand had come in and got the remaining Swords in the temple organized.”
“Damn. I take it you decided to cut out then?”
Faran let out an evil little chuckle. “Oh, no. I was going to take a crack at that bunch, too, but the main doors of the sanctum blew in about then and the Signet came charging through the wreckage with several more of the Hand and a whole pile of Swords at her heels.
That’s
when I decided it was time to head down here so I could play rear guard. I hadn’t expected her to just drop the roof on us though, or I might have made a different decision.”
Which meant the Signet and some number of troops were overhead right now, doing who knows what. Not good. But there was nothing we could do about it for the moment except get the rest of our comrades free and hope that the Signet thought we’d all died in the collapse. Glancing at the roof and the light but continuing fall of dust reminded me that we still could. We needed to pick up the pace. I spared a moment to hope the Signet’s presence with more of the Hand didn’t mean Jax was dead, but only a moment. If Jax was gone, that would be one more thing to put aside until I had the time to mourn her properly.
The door finally yielded to my efforts, popping open all at once and falling half off its hinges in the process. Light jabbed at my eyes, coming unexpectedly from floor level and hitting Triss hard enough to make him squawk like a punted chicken before he jumped behind me. The collapse had knocked a few stones loose from the ceiling in the tomb-turned-cell, including the one that had held the magelight, which now lay half buried. The fact that the slumped figure on the glyph-form rack beyond wasn’t moving, though he or she—impossible to tell through the glare—now hung mostly in shadow, was a very bad sign.
I scuffed some rubble in front of the magelight to block it further as I stepped over it on my way to the rack. I could see that the unconscious figure was male now. But whoever he was, he’d taken enough of a beating that I couldn’t identify him beyond that at first glance. In addition to the missing ear, he had a split lip and flattened nose, and both his eyes had been blacked. He looked more than half-dead, an impression belied only by the faint rise and fall of his chest.
As I knelt and reached for the buckle of the strap on his right ankle, a shadowy talon came out of the darkness behind the glyph to slap feebly at my hands. I jerked back in time to avoid most of the blow, but still ended up with a pair of bleeding scratches across the back of my right hand.
“Thiess!” snapped Triss. “Stand down this instant!”
“Resshath Triss?” The voice sounded muzzy and confused. “Master Aral? Is that really you, and not more evil visions?”
“Yes,” said Triss, his tone gentler now. “We’re here to free you and Javan, and the others.”