Chapter 17 The Dark Door #2
The demon’s head was not yet formed. Its lower and upper jaw were there, as were two narrow slits where a nose might have been .
. . but the rest of its face was nowhere to be seen.
Tiny stingers probed and struck at the air, rising up from the demon’s half-formed head.
Its left arm terminated in a hand—normal, for all intents and purposes—but its right ended in a huge, glossy hard-shelled pincer that snapped open and closed reflexively.
Its lower half was all scorpion, but nightmarishly large.
Eight legs. A long carapace. A curved stinger dripping with venom.
Great.
“Wendalith cohmerin tas,” the demon repeated, spittle flying from its mouth as it spoke.
I turned from it and gave my attention to the wall. We were officially out of time. If I didn’t break this thing open soon, we were so fucked.
“What the hell is it saying?” Carrion called.
“He’s singing to you,” Shah cooed. “Listen to him sing.”
I snorted. “It’s asking who stands before it. Who walks its path. Something like that. It’s speaking Old Fae, which it should not know,” I said pointedly, throwing those last words over my shoulder at the ancient monster.
Click, click, click.
It scuttled forward.
“I know many languages I should not know,” it rasped. “I hearrrrr them through the walls.”
“Great. It speaks Common Fae, too. Perfect,” I muttered to myself as I drove my fist into the wall again, staining the stone even redder with my blood.
“Two souls, I sense. Two strong bodies, too. A feast for a weak prince such as myself.”
“You’re no prince,” I growled. “You’re an abomination. One I’ll gladly be sending back to hell momentarily.”
“Don’t antagonize it,” Carrion hissed. “Its teeth are really fucking sharp. I do not want to get eaten!”
“Be quiet, Swift. It can’t eat you if it can’t find you.”
It was true that most demons didn’t have eyes.
There were tales of how this had come to pass, but many agreed demons resided in darkness and didn’t need to see to torment their victims. That had certainly been the case with Morthil.
But according to lore, Joshin was different.
It didn’t share the same abilities its siblings had been gifted with.
It was dangerous, yes, but it possessed no heightened spatial awareness.
Boom! Boom!
The bones in my hand splintered, but still I pounded against the magic that held the wall together.
I watched my shadows roil across the stone, shivering as a second wave came again and again, rolling after my magic and merging with it.
It made no sense. My shadows should be having some effect.
The old magic that formed the demon trap should have weakened a little, but it wasn’t even reacting.
At least not how it should have been. It was almost as though—
Click, click, click, click, CLACK.
“Fisher! Holy gods, fuck me, Fisher. Do something!”
I fell forward against the wall, exhausted. Turning, I found that the demon was steady on its eight legs now and venturing forward in search of its prey.
“Here, Master. This way,” Vorath coaxed. “Follow the sound of my voice.”
Gods curse it all. I’d had enough of this human. I shoved away from the wall and staggered forward.
And suddenly, there she was. My mother, standing next to me.
She wore her favorite dress. Blue, with birds embroidered onto the skirt.
I realized with a start that they were kingfishers.
Their wings flashed metallic blue; their proud chests were painted umber.
She looked as she had always looked: beautiful and sad.
Her long black hair fell in waves to her waist, blowing on an invisible wind.
“Where are you going, sweet boy? Have you lost your way?”
The soft lilt of her voice. Gods, how I had missed the sound of it. I shook my head. “I’m not lost. I’m going to kill that fucking human.”
A deep sorrow filled her eyes. “Who is he to trouble you? Great and mighty Kingfisher. Leave him be, my love.”
“This is his fault.” I was sweating again, even worse than before. My skin was prickling all over. “If he hadn’t brought us here—”
“Excuses,” my mother said sharply. “You always were one for excuses.”
I felt it then—the sick twist in the pit of my stomach. The nausea had taken a back seat to the pain, but my limbs were turning numb now. My hand barely even ached, even though it was badly broken. Fuck, I was going to throw up.
I doubled over, the room seesawing as I emptied my stomach onto the ground.
“And so it begins,” Joshin said.
Click. Click. Click.
He wasn’t heading for Carrion anymore. He was coming for me.
“Even as a child, you were a nuisance. Always following me like a pathetic little puppy. I never had a moment’s peace. You were the reason your father went away, you know. You were the reason he died.”
I straightened and found my mother’s face twisted with disgust.
“Look at the mess you’ve made. Always making such a mess.
And now you want to hurt that man? Why? Because you were stupid enough to follow him into this tower?
Because you weren’t paying attention, hmm?
Because you were lazy and too distracted by thoughts of the half-breed you left back in Yvelia to pay attention to the task at hand?
” The words spewed out of her in a torrent, dripping with disdain.
“What sort of male have you become? I don’t even recognize you. I’ve never been more ashamed.”
And at that, the room and the situation snapped into focus.
The figure standing beside me looked real.
I bet that if I reached out and touched her, she’d feel real, too.
But my mother was nothing like the cold-hearted illusion that stalked after me as I turned away from Vorath Shah and went back to the wall.
My mother was too kind and too sweet for such harsh words.
The dark dream had begun.
“Where are you going? What are you doing?” She hurried after me, her skirts swishing over the glowing runes at her feet. “So now you aren’t going to kill the human? Weak. Weak in your convictions. Weak-willed. That’s all you will ever be, Fisher. Weak.”
Her words flowed over me and fell away, having no effect.
My mother knew I wasn’t weak. She’d made sure of that herself. And I’d had way too much practice closing my mind off to the madness of the quicksilver to be affected by any vision that Joshin’s venom could show me.
I went back to work.
The section of the wall that I had struck just now was glowing softly. I hadn’t noticed before, but now that my eyes were clearing, the room sharpening, I was picking up things I hadn’t seen before. It was . . . it was glowing because of the blood.
“Not content with leaving your dinner on the floor? You need to smear your blood all over the walls as well?” the female who was not my mother said.
“Just give in already. Haven’t you had enough of all this?
The constant challenges, and the pain, and the sacrifices.
Always you. No matter what. You are the one who must give up his freedom.
You are the one who must tolerate the pain.
You are always the one who must sacrifice, when there are other people in the world who could be called upon every once in a while.
Aren’t you tired?” She sounded incredulous.
“Oh, yes. I’m tired,” I admitted. “But I doubt that’s going to change. And what’s the alternative? Death?”
“Rest,” the female wearing my mother’s face countered. “Peace. Isn’t that what you crave? No more pain. No more worry. No more—”
The gods only knew what other weak reasoning she came up with. I had stopped listening. I was dragging my finger through the blood I’d left on the wall, tracing out the lines of a very specific rune.
The rune meaning break.
As soon as the final line was drawn, the hallucination shook her head. “Well, there you are. You’ve done it now. I hope you’re happy.”
I stepped back, observing my handiwork. “I am actually.” The rune lit up, blazing and white.
It sank into the wall, its lines forming deep grooves in the stone.
The magic that shielded the wall stretched thin.
A veil of shadows shivered over the stonework—strange, since I hadn’t even reached for my magic—and I watched (and felt) the ward that protected the demon’s trap splinter and come apart.
“Gottith man soh frayah!” Joshin crowed.
The dark door is undone!
Its cry was elated. It felt the thin blanket of power removed at last from its tomb.
The lifting of the ward meant its escape, its freedom after how many centuries, squatting and waiting in the dark.
But I wasn’t about to let that happen. I didn’t love this realm, but it had produced someone I loved with a fierceness that took my breath away, and I was not going to leave this place worse off than when I had found it. For Saeris’s sake, I would protect it.
The demon trembled, individual scorpions jittering free of its mass and dropping to the floor. They skittered away in droves toward the stairs.
“Where do you think you’re going?” I asked.
“A city lies beyond these walls. A million beating hearts. A million humans to visit while they sleep. I will invite them all to the dream. I will . . . invite them all to sing!”
To dream meant to wander, trapped inside their nightmares.
To sing meant to scream out their fear so long and so loud that Joshin would feed from their pain for years before the city died.
The tunnels below Zilvaren were the perfect means of transport for Joshin’s scorpions.
They could move in darkness. Discover ways to slip into people’s houses.
They would sting them in their sleep, and the resulting symphony of fear it conducted would encompass the entire Silver City and sustain it for years.
But only if more than half of his scorpions managed to leave this room.