Chapter 39
I killed him just past the second bend.
It wasn’t much of a risk, or at least the act itself wasn’t.
Bendik wasn’t paying attention to me, let alone to the deadly knife in my hand, and thanks to Eihwaz’s rune-worked power, a scratch along the back of his neck was all it took.
He stumbled, then slumped to the ground without so much as a cry; he was dead before he hit the dark stone floor.
Durlain whipped around at the same moment, entirely himself again but for the distortion of his spelled eyepatch.
A plan shaped itself between us – the shared realisation, at least, that the true danger was not the murder itself but rather the threat of being caught with a dead guard on our hands.
Durlain unceremoniously grabbed the collar of Bendik’s chainmail.
I got hold of a limp ankle in the same moment, and together we dragged the sprawling corpse through the nearest doorway, back to the deserted stairwell we’d come from.
There I knelt to slit the dead man’s throat before shoving him more or less behind the central stone pillar – still murder, but at least this wouldn’t look so damningly like runic murder.
Only then did I allow myself a muffled, ‘Shit.’
Durlain didn’t speak at all as he sagged down on the bottom step of the stairs, and that was more alarming than any litany of curses he could have strung together.
Doubt kicked in. ‘If I shouldn’t have killed him …’
‘What?’ He jerked around, a movement like the lash of a whip. ‘Of course you should have killed him, don’t be ridiculous. I wouldn’t have walked out of there so easily if I hadn’t expected you to deal with him.’
Oh.
I wasn’t sure what unnerved me more: him placing such wordless trust in me, or the fact that I was apparently enough like him to make it work. ‘Then … do you have any other plans for what we do now?’
‘I always have plans,’ he said between his teeth, eye closing, head tilting back. ‘The problem is I currently don’t like them in the slightest. Make some suggestions.’
‘Um.’ I glanced over my shoulder, checking whether the corridor with its man-high windows was still empty. ‘We wait for their shift to end and try again? No, that’s no good – they’ll miss Bendik if we’re not back within the hour.’
‘And the guards at the tunnel gate may make a fuss sooner or later,’ Durlain added, sounding as though he’d like to rip every single one of them apart with his bare hands. ‘So we’re running on borrowed time, and we have no idea when the group at the dungeons will be replaced. No waiting.’
‘No.’ I swallowed another curse. ‘Do you want to kill them all and pick the lock, then? Suppose we could, but the chances of someone finding them—’
‘Too high. Yes.’
‘So what else could we—’
‘Well,’ he said, as if he’d been waiting for that question, ‘there is a second door to the dungeons, of course.’
I stared at him.
He gave a testy shrug in reply, strangely resembling a grumpy black cat about to hiss despite his layers of purple and gold finery.
‘Then why did we even try—’ I started … and the realisation dawned.
A second door. A door I’d laid eyes on myself not fifteen minutes ago – yellowed and damaged and far closer to a pit full of hungry sharks than any sane person could like, but a door all the same, and one that wasn’t guarded by even a single Garnot soldier.
If we could get outside – if we could make it through the poison fumes, if we managed to remain unnoticed while we slipped in through that grubby little entrance …
‘Oh,’ I said.
His lips twisted. ‘Yes.’
‘We have our scarves,’ I pointed out, thoughts spinning. ‘We can breathe out there, at least. And you could pick the lock.’
‘Yes,’ he said again, but he didn’t look any happier.
Which was reasonable. If anyone saw us clambering through that damned door, we’d be dead; there was no way to pass that off as an innocent misunderstanding.
Then again … these corridors were close to deserted, the door was hard to notice even if you knew it was there, and why would anyone be paying particular attention to the Maw and its surroundings on a day when no convicts were being fed to the sharks?
‘We’d just need to get outside somehow,’ I said, skipping that entire train of thought for the sake of pragmatics. ‘Maybe I can cut a hole in one of the windows? Uruz should—’
‘It’s tempered glass,’ he cut in, rubbing his face. ‘It’s strong, but when it breaks, it’ll shatter all over. And either way, there must be an exit somewhere close.’
I narrowed my eyes. ‘Must there?’
‘The windows are clean on the outside on this floor and the next.’ An absent wave at the ceiling.
‘And grimier on the higher floors. I figure whoever cleans them is not coming all the way from the tunnel in this toxic hell, so presumably there are more doors than we originally thought. We just need to find them.’
Sweet hell.
Did he notice everything?
‘So …’ I said, frowning at him even though he didn’t meet my gaze. ‘What exactly is stopping us from taking a look at the other entrance, then?’
‘You mean apart from the sharks,’ he snapped, ‘and guards, and the air that will fucking kill you if you breathe?’
‘Well. Yes.’ I grimaced. ‘Apart from those.’
‘Nothing, I suppose,’ he admitted, rising with a groan that seemed to come from the marrow of his bones. ‘Fine. Let’s go find a door.’
We found it within five minutes: a narrow servant’s exit at the far end of the lowest floor, sealed shut with two chains and three heavy iron padlocks.
Uruz’s rune-forged blade easily cut through the former, and it took Durlain about five minutes to pick the latter.
Bendik’s lifeless body hadn’t yet been discovered by the time we fastened our spelled scarves over our faces, I counted my knives three last times, and we slipped out into the stifling, sweltering fog.
It was foul.
I’d known it would be, of course; I’d heard the stories.
And yet the feeling of the gaseous poison against my skin was something else entirely – slithering against me like whale oil, lapping at my hands, my forehead, and the back of my neck like a thousand festering tongues.
Even through the runic protection of my scarf, the air tasted penetratingly of wrongness – sulphur, rotting flesh, a hint of something metallic that reminded me of blood.
My eyes watered before I’d taken ten steps into the miasma.
Hell, could one go blind from this place?
I doubted anyone had ever survived it for long enough to know.
We made our way along the steep slope of the mountain in silence, sparing our breath for the slippery, uneven rock and the molten heat that hung heavy in the air.
Mount Garnot loomed over us, impossibly large from so close.
On our other side, there was nothing but swirling, yellowish white as far as the eye could see – as though the whole of Seidrinn had been swallowed alive by this seething hell.
From up close, the theatre was even larger.
It could have seated close to a thousand people if it wouldn’t have killed them within moments – rows upon rows of stone benches carved from the dark rock.
Only as I cautiously clambered down from the irregular slope and onto the highest circle did I notice the stone was covered in a slimy yellow sheen, as if even the obsidian itself was sweating in this suffocating heat.
‘Best not to touch that,’ Durlain said behind me, voice muffled behind his scarf.
I tiptoed on even more carefully.
To my right, in the submerged heart of the theatre, the grey shapes of the sharks were circling frantically, their fins cleaving the surface.
Best not to look at them either, I decided, and kept my gaze stubbornly on the door and its protruding ledge ahead – blinking away tears, resisting the mounting urge to rub at the sweat and grime gathering on my skin.
I could imagine it now, the poor convicts being left on that thin strip of stone, every breath clawing through their windpipe, the Maw waiting below …
one bloody death or another, and how the hell did one make that impossible choice?
Was that part of the entertainment Lesceron provided for his court – watching people pick their own torture?
We didn’t move fast on the greasy stone, and yet I was out of breath by the time we reached the ledge itself, which ran about eight feet above the upper row of the theatre, the mountain slope too steep and slippery to climb onto it from that side.
It was the only obstacle between us and Lesceron’s dungeons, that wall of sweating black stone, and I was already reaching for my thigh before I’d aimed two decent thoughts at the problem.
‘If I lift you …’ Durlain started behind me.
I drew Uruz before he could finish that suggestion, burying the blade five inches deep into the glassy obsidian.
‘Ah,’ he said wryly. ‘Never mind. I’ll leave you to it.’
‘Wise,’ I said and took another stab at the mountain, this one at an angle from above.
Two more on either side of the incision I was creating, and I could wedge a fist-sized chunk of stone from the slope, leaving behind a prism-shaped hole in which one could, with a little effort, fit the toe of a boot.
I repeated the procedure a foot and a half higher, and one more time at face level.
Then I squeezed my right foot into the lowest foothold, my left fingers into the highest, and hauled myself up along the slope, Uruz still in my free hand.
Only when I was standing on my tiptoes on that small ridge of stone did I reach up again and dig the knife as deep into the mountainside as I could.
A small tug to test my weight against it.
It seemed to hold, so I let go of my handgrip, transferred my left hand to Uruz’s hilt, and pulled myself up to lift my feet to the next step, and the next, and then finally to the ledge on my right.
Crawling onto it was an inelegant affair, but I managed without slipping back down, and without touching the slimy stone with anything but my covered legs and elbows.
Durlain followed with a grace that suggested he’d been climbing deadly mountains daily since he was old enough to walk.
I wrenched Uruz from the obsidian surface as soon as he’d joined me on the narrow ledge, slid it back into the sheath on my thigh, and then ran a check of all my knives even though I knew I probably shouldn’t.
Fear begetting fear … but it seemed painfully likely, somehow, that one of them had managed to fall from its sheath unnoticed and quietly bounced down into the shark pit.
They were all there. I had to check twice to believe it.
Durlain had knelt before the fog-marked door in the meantime, pins in hand, and was dealing with the locks swiftly and easily. One, two, three, and the entrance swung open, revealing a dark, narrow corridor with barred doors on either side.
Lesceron’s dungeons.
Lesceron’s dungeons.
That infamous labyrinth of cells, running all the way beneath the smoking sea, and here we stood – rogue prince and runewitch – about to walk straight into the place designed to keep out every living soul.
If my eyes hadn’t been aching with every blink, I might have paused for a moment to let myself bask in the significance of the moment.
But the air was licking greasily at my skin, and every moment out here was another moment in which someone might glance out of a window and notice us.
I dove in. Durlain followed, a streak of black against the simmering white of the outside world, and closed the door behind him with a muffled curse – shutting out the foul odour and the oily feel of the fog and the feverish, suffocating heat at once.
For a moment, I saw only darkness.
Then my eyes adjusted, and Durlain’s silhouette materialised in the gloom, tall and gorgeous and covered in grime.
Traces of dust ran down his not-quite-familiar face.
The purple sheen of his hair now mingled with a sickly touch of bile-green, and the same colour clung in a thin film to his coat, his boots, and his trousers.
His true eye was bloodshot, and even his illusionary one looked like it had seen better times.
He was also smiling.
He untied his scarf and smiled, a feral, triumphant expression of such undisguised awe I would have had no choice but to kiss him senseless if not for the poison sticking to both our hands and faces – the very real risk of tasting sulphur on those sweet, sumptuous lips.
He owed me then, I decided. A mulled wine, a barrel of mead, and a few nights of compensation for the cruelty of having to keep my hands off him now; surely that wasn’t too much to ask?
‘Looks like we did the thing,’ I said, peeling my scarf off my face as well.
‘Quite, yes.’ His gaze flicked down over me. ‘If you ever allow anyone to put you in a cell again, you magnificent creature, there will be words.’
I beamed at him. I hadn’t even known I was capable of beaming – it seemed the sort of thing that luckier, happier people did in their spare time – but I did it all the same, and the corner of his lips quirked unmistakably higher.
In the distance, someone was howling in agony.
The place stank so pungently of mould and piss that I could smell it even over the stench of sulphur soaking my clothes, and I thought I heard the scurrying footsteps of rats or mice somewhere far too close.
But Durlain Averre looked at me as if I was the answer to every question he’d ever asked, and in the glory of the moment, I couldn’t think of a better place in the world to be.
‘Time to go?’ I suggested, not releasing his gaze.
A thread of tension tightened his expression, as if he’d allowed himself to forget for a heartbeat that we weren’t yet done. ‘Yes. Let’s go.’
So down the dusky corridor we went, past the grim rows of cells, towards the faint flicker of firelight waiting just around the bend.
Now we just needed to find Cimmura. Find Cimmura, get out the way we’d come in, hope the horses were still where we’d left them, hope no one would stop us at the tunnel exit …
But first, Cimmura.
We rounded the corner, blinking against the sudden brightness of the firelight.
And that was where our luck ran out.