Chapter 38
Thirty-Eight
Icame here to find Davrin. But I might have just discovered how I’m going to lose Falcen.
The truth, once it finally occurs to me, is like swallowing a fistful of razors. Falcen’s curse isn’t a curse at all. It’s an outcome. Some grand, magickal procedure tuned for maximum carnage and minimum mercy.
And the Resonance Academy is the architect.
The clatter of plates being stacked jolts me back to the present. The Hollow is still in that demented dining room. I don’t know how long I stand there, hands trembling, head against the wall, tracing the confirmation of my worst suspicions in the blood-splattered reliefs.
I can’t stay here. I don’t want to see what happens when the Hollow is done clearing the table, or if Malakai decides to add one more guest.
My stomach churns as answers I didn’t anticipate swirl through my mind. Davrin isn’t a prisoner to be rescued. He’s a prize specimen on the verge of becoming a weapon. A candidate.
I back away, footfalls muffled by the thick, rotted dust. My breath is shallow.
The urge to run is nearly overwhelming, but I remember the sound of the halflings, how the smallest vibration brought their heads up.
If I’m going to live through this, I need to be invisible, weightless, less than a memory.
There’s only one path left open to me, back through the gallery, to the bone door. Every other exit is blocked, guarded, or leads deeper into the labyrinth where the academy might keep worse nightmares.
The halfling chamber is unchanged. I can see them in the gloom, squatting on their haunches, pupils rimmed in sickly red. Bodies of their dead sprawl throughout the room, but the living don’t mourn. They just watch, and wait, breaths whistling through their sharp teeth.
My stomach knots, but I keep moving without the help of my weapon, remembering that its light put the “healthier” halflings into a frenzy.
I reach the bone door and pry at the seam with my fingers like I can tear it apart by will alone.
I pull. I claw. The door doesn’t move.
Panic floods in, hot and red.
Next plan. I shove my shoulder against the door until my vision whites out. Nothing. The decorative bones hold, dead and yellowed, as indifferent as a grave.
Chains slam behind me. Talons graze stone, the halflings emboldened by my noisy failure. I ram my shoulder into the slab once more and nearly bite my tongue at the shock of pain that sparks up my neck.
“Open,” I hiss in a panic, as if the door cares.
Wet breathing gathers close. Another chain zings tight and yanks a body back with a crack that rattles my ribs.
Then Ember’s whisper threads through my head.
Blood opens bone.
What? I respond, my mind half with her and mostly on the things about to eat me.
“The marks you bear in your blood match those carved in bone. The door will recognize its kin.” The eels said this to us.
That’s right.
A halfling scrapes closer. Claws click just shy of my boot. A clogged exhale washes against the back of my neck.
Think, Verily. Think.
My thumb still carries the cut from the barnacle earlier. Using my other thumbnail, I reopen it, then shove the fresh wound against the seam in the door.
Gold licks under my skin, faint at first, then brighter, threading through my veins the same way black rot takes root in Falcen’s. Then a weak heat slips through my skin, that thin line of gold spidering into the nooks and crevices of the stacked bones in the door.
Light catches, soft at first, then brighter.
A splitting groan pierces the silence as the door unseals. Not a grand swing. It’s more of a peel, the bone yielding enough to give me a slit to wiggle through.
It will have to be enough.
Talons slam the bone beside my head as I wedge my shoulder through.
A forked tongue lashes past my cheek. I shove my shoulder farther through the gap, ribs scraping, cloak catching and yanking back. Sharp claws skim the sole of my boot. Chains snap, furious and hungry, failing by inches. I wrench free and spill into the dark on the other side.
The door seals with a wet sigh that sounds too much like a mouth closing, and the resulting silence drops so fast that my ears ring.
I lie there, cheek on cold stone, breathing like I ran through smoke. My thumb burns. Gold flickers in the cut, then fades, and revulsion slides along my spine.
That hideous door opened for my blood.
Into that terrible place, hiding those horrendous, suffering things, opened because I fed it.
“Of course it did,” I mutter, rolling to my knees. “Why wouldn’t the creepy murder door respond to me?”
I wrap my thumb in the hem of my cloak and move, low and fast, using alcoves and the cover of night. I pass by the eels’ tank without a second look, intent on getting out of here, finding Falcen, and deciding whether I’m going to scream at him or kiss him or both.
Twice, I flatten as a Hollow drifts by, until stairs appear, a winding stack of stone that leads up into the academy’s gilded facade.
Memories fog my mind of those halflings and how their hunger shimmered in the air like cold lightning, how close I came to being torn in half by their reeking, fettered jaws.
But my body moves forward, stubborn and automatic, guided by a compass I don’t remember fixing inside myself.
At every turn, the architecture of the academy warps.
Hallways kink where they should be straight, sconces flicker in colors I’ve never seen, and the brass statuary lining the upper gallery has acquired, without warning, a new aspect: not quite smiling, not quite snarling.
I can feel the afterimage of the catacombs crawling up my bones like frost.
Darkening.
Binding.
Halflings.
The words make sense, but the meaning behind them slots in like dice thrown into a cup. Shake, listen, try again.
Bind. It could mean a bonding of sorts. But those chained halflings were all teeth and hunger. There were no minds left to steer.
Those beasts were rotting and starving to the point of frailty.
Falcen. He’s not a halfling. Is he the success versus the failure of the halflings?
Ember gives a soft shudder of heat, then cuts off abruptly, as if she wants to contribute but has decided against it.
Fine, then. I don’t want to keep relying on her, anyway. If what I witnessed in the underground chambers has been going on for as long as I believe it has, there’s no time for me to bumble around. I have to figure this out before more Soulren die. Before Falcen dies.
I brace a palm on the wall to keep my stomach where it belongs.
I wish Falcen were here. The thought burns through my exhaustion. My legs move mechanically, one foot in front of the other.
Who do the Resonance Keepers want to attack with these creatures?
The Void? Are they making monsters from their best soldiers to fight monsters?
And what is Falcen’s role in all this? Unlike the imprisoned halflings, he’s still functional.
For now. Right up there with Davrin. No wonder they forced Falcen to return to the academy when he tried to leave.
I barely register which part of the academy I’m in until I all but collide with a door—a heavy, iron-braced slab at the terminus of a corridor reserved for the Elites.
For a moment, I stand, uncomprehending, dumbfounded by the fact of my own arrival.
Goddess above, did I truly arrive at Falcen’s chambers without conscious thought? As if my body knew where I needed to be while my mind was lost in a walking nightmare?
Yet here I am, hand hovering over the iron latch, with an ache in my chest that has nothing to do with exhaustion and everything to do with a gravitational pull I would rather die than admit. This is his territory, the inner sanctum of Vehloria’s most dangerous, most broken, most necessary weapon.
And here I am, standing outside it like a suitor with flowers gone to wilt.
I squeeze my eyes shut, searching for a stray thread of logic.
I should be returning to my own bed and barricading myself behind what passes for safety, hiding from the revelations of the underground chamber and the certainty that I’ve already seen too much, understood too much, to ever be allowed to walk away clean.
Instead, something in my bones tells me that the only place I can breathe tonight is on the other side of this door.
I tell myself I’m here for answers. That Falcen, for all his reticence, will be the one to explain what I just witnessed, to put words to the grotesque science of the halflings and the golden hunger blooming uncomfortably inside my veins. Maybe, if I wait long enough, I can be here when he returns.
Liar.
I’m here because the alternative is to be absolutely, abjectly alone.
You are never alone.
I am in this, I respond. Ember cares about Falcen about as much as she cares about anything, which is to say, not much.
Before I can talk myself into or out of it, a sound from within halts my hand an inch above the latch.
It’s not a cry. Not exactly. The noise is guttural, almost bestial, a low, repeated scraping of syllables that seem to chisel themselves into the air.
I recognize the cadence, if not the words.
It’s the broken tongue of the chained halflings, but different, as if all the rage and agony of those failed experiments has been distilled into a single, controlled utterance.
The back of my neck prickles.
But I don’t run. I press my palm to the door. The iron is so cold it bites, and the handle stings like a live wire. Still, I hold fast, as if by touching this threshold I can anchor myself to something real.
A faint vibration skates through the metal, and then a pulse of blue light traces the keyhole. The door unlatches, not with the courtesy of a host, but the sullen resignation of an Elite reaching into himself and using his soul-energy to pull it open for me.
Falcen?