Chapter Thirty-Three
I tried to stand, but it didn’t go any better this time. The room did its shaky-shaky thing, and I stumbled into Alphonse. Who I guessed didn’t want to wait for me and my pathetic human recovery time because I was snatched up, flung over a beefy shoulder, and carted down the sloping tunnel like a sack of beans.
I’d have preferred Pritkin’s shoulder, but he was up ahead, taking point, and as laser-focused as usual in a crisis. Everyone else flowed after him and Bodil, leaving me and Alphonse to bring up the rear. And to watch the passage trundle by, as there was nothing else to do.
Enid’s light source was ahead of us, possibly leading the way considering how dim it was here. But it nonetheless lit up the walls with a faint, shifting radiance, like looking at the moon from underwater. And showed me glimpses of rubble extending much farther than I’d expected—piles of it.
In places, it half obscured the tunnel in slanting mountains of rock and dirt, forcing Alphonse to clamber over. He didn’t get winded because vampire, but I heard some huffing and puffing up ahead, probably from Enid. I felt for her, as there was a ton of stuff in the way, making the walk an obstacle course.
Much of it was unexpected, such as the shattered pieces of wood propped against the walls or reinforcing the rubble in spots as if somebody had tried to make barricades. There were also a bunch of crates that had once held magical weapons and were now mostly empty and dust-covered. And the few potion bombs still in place, like eggs in their cartons, were sunken in and looked decayed.
There were also a few discarded hand-held weapons here and there, primarily broken spears and pikes and one sword half covered in dirt. Alphonse bent over and pulled it out of the rubble. Like the pikes, it was almost new-looking.
Of course, this part of the tunnel was bone dry, unlike the area outside, where vines and mildew had taken over, and further down, where the river ran. So that might explain the state of the weapons. But it didn’t explain why they were here at all or why the rest of this place looked so unfamiliar.
I glanced around, wondering just how far back we’d been sent. Because the tunnels that Pritkin and I had made our frantic escape through hadn’t looked like this. Like most of this place, they’d been tall to accommodate fey height and black and glittery.
They had not had huge chunks of rock missing, as if a backhoe had carved them out or the walls had been mined to provide rubble for the nearby barricades. They had not had giant cracks scrawling like black lightning everywhere and a half-collapsed ceiling as if someone had tried to seal themselves in after the barricades fell. I would have thought I was reading the signs wrong, but Alphonse saw them, too.
“You can see where they put charges,” he said, his voice low and his finger pointing up at the fractured ceiling, the ruins of which we were slowly clambering over. “Brought it down in big enough chunks to impede a tank.”
But it hadn’t been enough. Because we were traveling a path carved through the wreckage, and while it wasn’t easy, it was doable. And seemed to go on forever.
“Wasn’t enough,” Alphonse agreed. “Looks like whoever was defending this place brought down half the mountain, and whoever was attacking just kept going.”
“Who was attacking?” I asked. “Those things out there?”
“Dunno.” He kicked something with his foot, which I guessed he’d been able to smell despite it being buried under dirt. A human skull peeked out at us, but there was no body attached. And the skull. . .
My thoughts petered out, but Alphonse wasn’t so squeamish. “Whoever it was, they were hungry,” he said and crushed the gnawed-on bone under his boot.
He walked on.
Alphonse stayed busy ducking under pieces of rock or climbing over debris. It was bad enough that he was continually cursing in places, but nobody shushed him. I even heard a few competing phrases from up ahead after somebody jostled a precarious slab and almost got crushed.
“Everybody okay up there?” Alphonse yelled as the rockfall sent reverberations along the tunnel.
“All right,” Enid called back. “But be careful. This part is not stable!”
“Like everything else in this damned place,” Alphonse muttered over the echoes of the fall, which were loud enough to wake the dead, only nobody seemed to care.
Maybe because, while a battle had happened here, it hadn’t been recent. Drifts of dust in the crevasses glittered in the low light, highlighting those jagged scars instead of being suspended in the air. Like the coating on the weapons, it had been here for a while.
Alphonse edged closer to the right wall to avoid another unstable area, and I reached out and touched the pole of a pike that had been propped against the stones for who knew how long.
“What do you want that for?” Alphonse demanded. “It’s broken. The end was snapped off in someone’s hide.”
Or something’s, I thought.
“I don’t want a weapon,” I said. “I want to touch it, but it’s coated in dust.”
“You gonna do something?” he asked, putting me down on some fallen stones.
“Gonna try.”
“Okay.” He looked around but couldn’t find any part of us that wasn’t just as dirty as the pike. So he shook it instead, then rubbed a big palm over it to get it, if not clean, at least less filthy. I took it gingerly, hoping for a flash of something.
I wasn’t the best touch telepath out there, but sometimes, it worked.
And sometimes it didn’t. What it did not do was to shoot a skin-crawling frisson straight up my spine. Along with a sense of wrongness so dizzying that I’d have probably fallen over if I hadn’t been propped against the rocks. I dropped the pike and clamped my teeth on a scream I didn’t understand.
“You’re freaking me out right now,” Alphonse said.
“Sorry.”
He shrugged. “S’okay. I’m used to it. You were a creepy kid.”
“I was not.”
“Big, blank blue eyes, looking like they stared into a guy’s soul. And that was when you weren’t busy talking to people who weren’t there or laughing at jokes nobody told.”
“I was talking to ghosts—”
“Yeah, ‘cause that makes it so much better. You want that thing or not?”
He gestured at the pike.
“No.”
“Okay.” He threw me back over his shoulder and walked on. “You gonna tell me what you saw? ‘Cause I remember that reaction. You used to scream for no reason all the time. I thought you were going nuts ‘till Sal said you got pictures sometimes.”
“Sometimes,” I agreed, wishing he’d drop it.
He did not drop it. “She said you can touch stuff and see who owned it or what they did when they used it. So, what did you see this time?”
I shivered slightly and knew he felt it. “Nothing.”
“You wanna explain that, or do I gotta keep playing twenty questions?”
I struggled to find the right words, but it didn’t go well. It reminded me of the first few moments after I arrived here, when I’d felt a scrim across the world. As if it wanted to reject me as being wrong somehow.
That didn’t make sense as I’d been to plenty of different times and never felt that way, although I had always been a visitor who didn’t belong, like one of those stray leaves stuck to the bottom of a dark witch’s shoe. I rubbed the fingers that had been clutching the pike together and felt the grittiness of the dust again. The pang was less now but still there, and not just on the pike.
Now that I concentrated, I could feel it everywhere, in the dirt clinging to me or the breath in my lungs. There was something wrong, but it wasn’t this place. It was me.
I was the displaced thing, and this world knew it. It sounded ridiculous, but I could feel it as clearly as if I was looking at a “Don’t Enter” sign. As if I’d somehow breached a forbidden zone where I was not supposed to be.
Was it because of the Horrors? And if it was, how were they doing this? They didn’t have power over time any more than Tony did!
Not to mention that ?subrand was right: when had demons crawled all over Faerie? Because I’d sat through a lot of deadly dull briefings in recent months, many of them about fey history, and nobody had mentioned that. And he’d probably received far more lessons growing up in a position where he might be called on to rule parts of this place someday.
So what the hell?
“Cassie?” Alphonse prompted because he was relentless.
“There’s nothing, and then there’s nothing,” I said shortly. “I didn’t get anything that would help.”
“Yeah. Just be certain you mention it when you do.”
Sure thing, I thought, trying to concentrate as I bounced along, but it was hard. Maybe because it felt like my brain was sloshing around in my skull, still trying to play catch up. And that wasn’t helped when we finally reached the stables again.
The first thing I saw were reflections in the canal, which had me gasping in thirst with Bodil’s brief drink long gone. Alphonse must have heard because he swung me down, where I wobbled a little but stayed up. Causing him to give me an approving slap on the back that almost knocked me into the water.
“Hey,” he called out. “Give it a minute. We need a rest.”
The others stopped, possibly because the water looked good to them, too. It turned out not to be fit to drink, being brackish from the flow outside, but Bodil filtered out some balls of the stuff that allowed us to quench our thirst. After which, we sat on the steps leading down from the quay and washed some of the dirt off.
The mud from outside had turned into dried chunks that caked everything, including my hair. I shook it as clean as possible, then felt fingers combing through it from behind, pulling free the bits I couldn’t see. I glanced up but already knew who was there.
I covered one of Pritkin’s hands with mine, and he sat beside me. We just stayed there for a minute, glad to be alive but unsure what this fresh hell was. He didn’t ask if I had any ideas— he knew I’d have mentioned them if I did—and I didn’t offer anything.
I still had no idea what was going on.
Enid ran past and jumped into the water, splashing us, and came up smiling. I suddenly wondered how old she was, as that kind of resiliency was rare. Not to mention that she looked about sixteen suddenly with that exuberant hair plastered against her skull.
Alphonse sat down on the other side of me a moment later and sighed, his eyes on Enid. “I’m officially a dirty old man,” he proclaimed.
“You are dirty,” I agreed. “Maybe a swim?”
“Don’t tempt me.”
“Why? She’d curse your balls off if you got out of line.”
He laughed suddenly, a brief bark. “That’s half the attraction.”
“And the other half?” I wondered if it was just her strange, almost ethereal beauty.
But she looked a little more real now, splashing about and causing the mud in her hair to trickle down her face in dark rivulets. She’d also dropped the glamourie, probably to conserve whatever magic she had left. And when ?subrand, who had sat on the other side of Alphonse, noticed, I heard his indrawn breath.
“Exactly what you think,” Alphonse told me. “Takes lady balls not to have your spirit broken someplace like this, and triple that after what she went through.” He glanced at our silver prince. "One word,” he told him. “One goddamned word—”
“I am not a monster, vampire. I leave that to you.”
“See that you do.”
“Or?” ?subrand bristled. He didn’t seem to take orders well.
Alphonse draped a very large arm around his shoulders. “Ask Cassie.”
?subrand looked at me, appearing startled for some reason. I guessed well-brought-up fey women turned deaf at times like these. Too bad I wasn’t one.
“Which story should I tell him?” I asked Alphonse, who had found a toothpick in his borrowed guard’s outfit and was picking at his fangs. He shrugged, and I glanced at ?subrand, who looked like he wanted to throw off the brotherly hug but wasn’t sure it was a good idea.
“He has something of a reputation,” Pritkin commented idly as if he’d know. And maybe he did. It had been his job to check out anybody hanging around me, and Sal and Alphonse had been at Dante’s, the casino where I had my court, a while back.
“So do I!”?subrand bristled.
“Yes, but your opponents are usually in one piece at the end.”
That took ?subrand a minute, then he scowled and got up before huffing off. Alphonse grinned at us. Enid splashed some more.
And Bodil did what she had been doing all this time after quenching our thirst. And stood at the top of the steps, looking around with a frown, maybe wondering where the seahorses were. I didn’t see any.
I didn’t see much of anything except the canal itself, which looked odd for some reason I couldn’t immediately name. Then I realized the shimmering, ever-changing cascade of emerald light from the suspended river wasn’t there. I peered upward but couldn’t see what was in its place, as the ball of spell light Enid had parked on the pier didn’t reach that far.
Whatever it was, it was dark.
Pritkin glanced up, and I saw him noticing, too, but he didn’t say anything.
“Why didn’t you want me to say anything to Enid?” I asked him after Alphonse went off to smoke a cigarette.
“You were about to tell her the truth.”
“And that’s bad?”
“It is when we don’t know what we’re facing here. She saved us out there in the rock fall. Best not to alienate an asset in an emergency.”
I frowned, although he did have a point. But then, so did she. “It sounds like she thinks you’re going to free the slaves if we win.”
“That would be . . . difficult.”
“Difficult isn’t impossible.”
“No, but if they’re free, we don’t have much of an army. They make up a good percentage of the Alorestri forces.”
“So, we’re supposed to send slaves out to die for us?”
“It’s their fight, too. If we lose this war, none of us may survive. Or they may look back on their time as slaves to the Alorestri as ‘the good old days.’”
“Maybe, but you and I signed onto this. We made a choice, one they never had.”
“Did we?” He looked at me. “How much of a choice did you ever have? How much did I? Unless you count the choice to die on our feet or kneeling!”
That last was said in the same low voice he’d been using, giving us some degree of privacy, but there was genuine anger in it. “We’re supposed to be the good guys,” I reminded him.
“We’re trying to be. I’m trying to be.” He was quiet for a moment. “Sometimes, it’s hard to know what that is.”
I lay my head on his shoulder and felt his arm go around me. “Yeah. There’s no manual.”
“What?”
“I’ve been saying since I landed this job that there should be a manual, but there isn’t. For a long time, I wondered why no Pythia ever made one, wrote down a how-to guide, a top-ten list, something . They left all kinds of other writings, whole libraries full of them, but not that.
“Then I worked with Gertie for a while and started to understand. There’s no manual because there can’t be one. She told me once to trust my heart, that it was the best guide I’d ever get in this crazy world. I thought that sounded strange, but I’m starting to understand what she meant.”
“And what did she mean?”
“That in times like these, you just have to feel your way, day to day. You want to be perfect; you think you have to be perfect, but none of us are. But the fact that you want to be, that it weighs on you when you’re not, that you keep on trying even when everything seems hopeless . . . it’s what makes you a good person.” I looked up at him. “A good man.”
“I’m not a good man.”
“If you’re not, I don’t know one.”
“Then you don’t know one.” He got up abruptly and walked away down the side of the canal.
“Pritkin—” I started after him, but Alphonse, standing at the top of the steps and probably eavesdropping, caught my arm.
“Give him a minute. He’s had a tough couple of weeks.”
Haven’t we all? I thought, wondering what the hell.
“And guys like him, who think they’re in charge, blame themselves when things go wrong.”
“This had nothing to do with him. This was Tony—”
“Yeah, but still. You wanna talk? Talk after the crisis is over. You’ll get further.”
And it was hard to argue with that.
After a few more minutes, the group reassembled, and we walked on.
The stable office where Pritkin and I had been interrogated was also radically different, with what looked like another barricade thrown up in front of it, this one made primarily out of furniture. I recognized a bunch of sturdy wooden tables and a few broken bits of wood that might have been saddle holders. That seemed like a crap job of barricading for the kind of people who lived here and whose magic should have sufficed anyway.
But maybe the Green Fey hadn’t colonized this place, back whenever the heck this was? I didn’t know, but looking at the splintered wood gave me a bad feeling. It told a story of shock, unpreparedness, and desperation.
And of failure, as the barricade hadn’t held.
Suddenly, I really didn’t want to go in there. But Bodil felt differently and pushed forward, squeezing past the hanging shards and blackened stones, and we slowly followed. Annnnnd I should learn to listen to my gut, I thought, finally understanding where all the people went.
And where they’d stayed.
Pritkin, Alphonse, and I had stopped just inside the entrance, with Alphonse’s arm flung out in front of me like a parent catching a child in a fender bender. But Bodil was standing in the middle of the room with no expression on that beautiful face. I couldn’t blame her.
I didn’t know what was on mine, but it might have looked similarly blank, as I wasn’t sure what would fit the moment. Because there were bones everywhere as if we’d walked into an ossuary. Only in that case, they’d be in nice little rows and patterns, and nothing was orderly here.
The remains of the defenders were littered across the floor, piled against the walls, and blackened in chunks as if spells had eaten through flesh and bone. Or, in one memorable case, as if someone had been blasted against the wall with such force that he had remained there like a partially excavated fossil. I even thought I saw an expression of surprise on his face or what was left of it.
He was alone, but in other areas, it was impossible to tell how many dead there were, as skeletons were piled on top of skeletons. Their flesh was mostly gone now except to stain their bones, with even the smell of decay long gone other than for a mustiness in the air that I tried not to think about. But their clothes, ragged though they were, were intact, and the robes were black, like the type Bodil’s guards had worn, the ones that had given them the bat-like appearance that had so startled me when I first came here.
This had been someone’s last stand.
I took in the gouges in the walls, the marks that spell fire had left on virtually everything, and the rotting hulk of some fallen beast in a corner. It was unrecognizable now, its fur covered with a fine layer of black dust. Like the huge pile of the dead that had all but blocked a door beside the stall that Bodil had used as an office.
The black-garbed guys had made a new blockade there, out of their bodies this time, but it hadn’t been enough. It had been plowed through, too, leaving heaps of broken skeletons framing the entrance, a few still held together by rotting sinew. I stared at them, wondering what had been in there that was so important.
The only thing I remembered was that it was the door Rieni had disappeared through after saddling me with a bunch of baby seahorses. And then laughing and skipping out of the room, secure in the knowledge that there was little a fey child couldn’t get away with. Especially that child.
Which was why it seemed strangely appropriate to see her again, emerging from its shadow and stepping delicately over the bones, a slender figure clad all in black with a faint green luminescence still clinging to her. It was so appropriate that I didn’t even question it for a moment. “That was you,” I started to say, recognizing the color of the beast that had saved us at the lake by distracting the demons for a crucial few seconds.
But I didn’t.
I didn’t say anything.
Because the implication of her being here had just hit, and because Rieni . . .
Wasn’t herself.