Of the Abyss (17 page)

 

CHAPTER 21

“H
ansa, wake up, or I swear to the Abyss I'll—­”

The combination of the shouting and a slap brought Hansa out of his nearly comatose state.

“ 'Kay, okay,” he grumbled, struggling to open his eyes. “Okay. Stop hitting me.”

“Hansa, you need to—­”

He finally focused his gaze and discovered that the woman who had been abusing him was none other than Cadmia Paynes. “How'd you get in here?”

“The door was unlocked. Hansa, you have to get up now. Ruby's been hurt.”

Hansa sat up so fast his head spun and he gagged. He hadn't felt this hung-­over since a poorly conceived overnight trip with Jenkins, Ruby, and a bottle of cheap rum when they had been teenagers. “What's wrong with Ruby?”

As soon as he asked, he remembered. “Ooh . . . oh, no.” He pressed a hand to his temple as he climbed to his feet.

“I don't care if you're sleeping with the spawn or making deals with the Abyss,” Cadmia said, her voice frigidly controlled, “but if this is your fault, then it's your responsibility to make it right.” She threw a shirt at him, which he fumbled at, trying to remember how to put it on.

“I'm not—­”

“I just said, I don't care,” she snapped. “Hurry up!”

“Ruby left me,” he said. “I didn't . . . I mean, there's nothing to make
right.
We're over.”

“I figured that when she said she—­oh,
never mind
!” Cadmia snarled. “Didn't you hear me say she's
hurt
?”

He had, but he hadn't been awake enough to think about it. This time the words reached him. “Hurt how? Is she okay?” He managed to get the shirt on. He misaligned one pair of buttons, but Cadmia didn't wait for him to fix it before she threw more clothes at him, followed by socks and boots.

“If she were okay, I wouldn't have come here!” Cadmia shouted, as he hustled to finish dressing. “Come on.”

Heart pounding again now, he raced after her, pulling on his boots as he stumbled with her out the door. “Where are we going?”

“Docks,” Cadmia answered. She was already nearly sprinting; he loped after her, his long legs keeping up easily despite his care not to slip on the still-­falling snow.

“What happened?” he managed to gasp.

Cadmia shook her head.

W
hen they reached the docks, a man in the garb of a sailor grabbed Cadmia's arm. “Sister, where have you—­”

“Where did they bring her?”

The man dropped his gaze. “They brought healers from the Napthol, but . . .”

Hansa listened to the exchange, and felt all the warmth drain out of his body. “What happened?” he said, his voice little more than a whisper.

“Who are you?” the sailor asked.

“This is Hansa. Ruby's fiancé,” Cadmia said.

The man's eyes widened. “I'm sorry,” he said, words broken. “They . . . she's at the King's Ransom. We had to send for the Quinacridone to . . . to pick her up. I'm sorry,” he said again.

Hansa leapt ahead. Both of them hurried after him, but he was barely aware. They couldn't mean what he knew they meant. She couldn't be
dead
. She was alive just a few hours ago. She was fine.

He fell into the door of the King's Ransom, and was instantly cussed at by a man who had been on the other side.

“Where's Ruby?” he demanded.

The man looked at him as if he were mad—­which was probably how he looked. “Who?”

Cadmia had caught up. She guided him inside. “This way,” she said softly. Behind them, the sailor was giving their apologies to the person Hansa had nearly knocked over.

“You can't—­”

Hansa glared at the maid who tried to keep him out of the room where Ruby lay. A single candle by the bedside provided the only light. Even in the flickering, rosy glow, reflected by an absurd glass vase full of silk flowers, Ruby's skin was icy pale, her lips white, her fingertips blue.

The sailor was speaking to Cadmia in the doorway. He probably thought his voice was soft enough that Hansa wouldn't hear, but Hansa had discovered that the world seemed to have gone very quiet. He could hear his own pulse. He could certainly hear this man's voice. “It took too long to find her in the water. The doctor is still worried about the first mate, he was so frozen by the time he brought her out. She never even woke.”

Hansa gripped Ruby's hand. “What was she doing at the docks?” he managed to choke out.

“Trying to find a ship from Kavet,” the sailor said.

He dropped his head. Ruby's hand was cold. Cold. Her normally bright eyes were closed, but it wasn't like ­people said. She didn't look like she was sleeping.

“I'm sorry,” he whispered. “Ruby, I'm sorry . . .”

She was trying to get a ship, yes, but not away from Kavet: away from
him.
He had been willing to lose her, but not this way.

“I'm sorry,” Cadmia said, her soft words like barbs. “I should have told you more gently, but I thought if I got you here in time, maybe you could . . .” She trailed off, clearly deciding she had been wrong.

She wasn't wrong. There was one thing he could do.

When he had asked Umber if he could bring Jenkins back, the spawn hadn't said,
No, it's impossible to revive the dead.
He had said that, given how Abyssi kill, there probably wasn't enough of the body. He was looking at Ruby's body, which was whole and unmarred as long as he ignored the blue cast of her skin.

He reached over to the absurd vase of decorative flowers: silk lilies, in what looked like hand-­blown glass. It didn't matter much; it shattered as he brought it down on the corner of the nightstand.

The sound seemed to go on and on. It took him a few seconds to realize he wasn't just hearing breaking glass, but shouting, from Cadmia and the sailor.

It didn't matter what happened to
him
after this. It was about time he accepted responsibility for the choices he had made. It wasn't his fault the Abyssi had injured him or that Umber had saved him the first time; if they had executed him then, it would have been unjust. That didn't absolve him of meddling with powers he
knew
were treacherous. He had been furious that Xaz was so close to Ruby because it was well known that, even when a mancer did nothing intentionally malevolent, the powers they worked with were dangerous to anyone around them.

He knew all that. He meddled anyway. Ruby paid the price.

He picked up one of the shards of glass. Cadmia grabbed his wrist, trying to stop him.

“Hansa, calm down,” she said. “Calm down. You don't want to hurt yourself.”

“I'm pretty sure he's not trying to
hurt
himself,” came the sailor's voice.

“I'm doing what you wanted,” Hansa said. “I'll be fine.”
Fine
wasn't exactly true. He would be arrested and executed. All that was okay, though, if Ruby was alive.

Cadmia was holding both of his wrists, but that didn't matter. He heard the other man say, “Sister, maybe you should leave him alone,” as he closed his hand around the glass. He just needed blood.

The glass sliced across the inside of his fingers and his palm. He whispered, “Umber, get your ass in here.”

Cadmia's eyes widened.

“This was a bad idea,” she whispered. The sailor clearly agreed, since he had already run out, probably on his way to get guards. It didn't matter; Umber hadn't had any trouble getting past guards in the Quin compound.

“You should probably go,” Hansa told Cadmia. “You don't want to appear involved.” Once again, that tight feeling in his chest made breathing and speaking difficult. Or was that panic? Or the lingering residue of last night's adventures?

“Hansa, I was wrong,” Cadmia said. “I wasn't thinking clearly.
You're
not thinking clearly. A terrible thing has happened, but . . .” She shook her head, and murmured as if to herself, “They say an impulse you can't explain is caused by the Others whispering in your ears.”

“I feel like I'm thinking more clearly than I have been in days,” Hansa said. He had started this. He would finish it.

“I don't think you—­”

Umber interrupted her, storming into the room with the words, “Hansa, what in the three planes do you think you are—­” He broke off as he took in the scene. “Hansa, don't do this.”

“Hansa—­” Cadmia tried again, but Umber held up a hand, silencing her.

“Sister, go get a drink or something,” Umber said. “Make sure we aren't bothered.”

A moment later, Umber, Hansa, and Ruby were alone.

“You can bring her back,” Hansa said.

Umber winced. “You absolved me of this, Hansa.”

“But you
can
.”

“Alone? No,” Umber replied. He kept his tone even, trying to sound reasonable, but Hansa was past being reasonable. “I can heal, but she's
dead,
Hansa. Look at her. She's frozen.”

“Could a necromancer bring her back?” Umber had implied that in the jail cell, too.

“Probably, but—­”

“Then find one!”

“Hansa—­”

“Don't argue with me! She died because of me, because of us. Because I wanted—­”

“To live?” Umber suggested. “To save a young girl? Hansa, you haven't done anything wrong. You aren't responsible for her choices.”

“She doesn't really
have
any choices left, does she?” Hansa demanded. “If I had had any sense at all, I would have let go of her when she first tried to leave me. Instead, I
committed
the crime she had broken the marriage off over in order to manipulate her into forgiving me. Into begging
my
forgiveness. I could have just asked you to save me from rotting in that jail, but did I stop with that? No. I let you make me into some kind of hero. Maybe that's why the Quinacridone says pride is so dangerous.”

“Self-­pity is dangerous, too, Quin,” Umber warned. “It can make you do stupid things. Take a deep breath and remind yourself that sometimes bad things happen. We can't control everything.”

“What happens to suicides?”

“What—­what?” Umber asked.

“Suicides. Napthol and A'hknet both mostly say suicides . . .” His voice choked off.

“I don't know where they go,” Umber said. “And even in the Order of the Napthol, individuals disagree about exactly what happens in the afterlife.”

“She was
good
,” Hansa insisted. “I've known her since we were little kids. She doesn't deserve to end up in the Abyss because of what I did.”

“Hansa, why don't we go get something to eat and put you back to bed?” Umber said gently. “There's nothing you can do.”

“You said a necromancer could help her.”

“Neither of us is a necromancer,” Umber pointed out.

“You could get one.”

“Let's not go down that road, Hansa,” Umber said. “The last thing you want is to get more mancers involved in your life.”

“I've messed up my life already. I'll deal with that when I come to it. Ruby shouldn't pay for what I've done. I know you say it's not my fault, but if I'd been the person I pretended to be, then we wouldn't be in this mess because she never would have had reason to doubt me. Bring her back.”

“Hansa, I can't—­”

“Find
a necromancer,” Hansa demanded, “and make him bring her back. Convince her they saved her, convince everyone they pulled her out of the water in time. I know you can do it.”

“Hansa
,
you don't want to do this,” Umber said. Pleaded, really. “Let her go.”

“I don't care what happens to me—­”

“
I
rather care what happens to you, since my doing this would mean cementing the bond between us. Do you understand that? There are ways to work around the bond, usually. All spawn know how to do it. You make deals, tit for tat as it goes, like I agreed to help Pearl for Cadmia in exchange for her silence. I could have silenced her myself, and I would have helped Pearl in for nothing, but sometimes power does things we don't expect. Making a ‘fair' deal keeps the scales even and keeps a bond from forming.”

“So what do you want?” Hansa asked. “Make me a deal. I'll do it.”

“You don't understand what you're saying,” Umber said, speaking very clearly and slowly. “Spawn do not associate with mancers. There is nothing you could possibly offer me that would convince me to make any deal that forced me to not only seek one out, but do whatever was necessary to get one's
help
.”

“I don't need to convince you.”

“Which is why
I
am trying to convince
you
that
you
do not want to do this.”

Hansa picked up another shard of the vase. It glistened in the candlelight.

“Blood to seal the boon, right?” he asked.

“Hansa, listen to me,” Umber argued. “The third boon creates a permanent bond.
Permanent.
There is no way to break it. The symptoms of that bond vary drastically, but it is possible that you will lose all you are and become so obsessive that I'll have to lock you away.”

“That's the risk I'll take, then. You know what I want.”

“You don't want this,” Umber sighed.

“Not really,” Hansa said. “But I don't see a choice.” He held up the shard of glass, examining the edge. “Do you have a preference of location?”

“Don't do this.”

“I imagine the longer we wait, the more difficult it is going to be to bring her back,” Hansa said. “We should get on with it.”