Chapter 9 #2
“Almost all of the bastions are on the black map levels—those closest to the surface. They served as our homes, our towns, our blood-rendering plants…” She trailed off for a moment, looking around at the stark stone room and the terrible statue of Liliach.
“It’s…I’m sorry. In a way it’s hard to discuss this like its ancient history, when many of my people lived here.
My family, my father and uncles and aunts, actually lived in this terrible place.
” Marrion frowned. “Like animals hiding in caves, and every moment could easily have been their last. I’ve been told… some of them did go mad down here.”
“You don’t have to talk about it,” I said quietly. I could not say I knew exactly what she felt, but I tried to imagine for a moment that everyone I ever knew, all of my ancestors, had made their lives down here…and how it must feel to lay eyes upon it and realize the vast awfulness of it all.
She took a breath and exhaled slowly. “No, I’m fine.
It’s almost hard to believe, is all. It really puts my own problems in perspective.
” She let out a wry laugh. “Anyway. My mentor spoke to me of the path, and the bastions. She taught me how to test the water, how to trace old trails, and the signs to watch for. So we three will be going ahead and scouting the path for our supplies and men. Once the Blood Accords were signed, everything of value we had was moved above, and the bastions have likely fallen into disrepair or been, ah, inhabited.”
“‘Inhabited’,” I muttered under my breath, checking my pistol again. “It’d probably be too much to hope we’re just talking about a wild animal?”
“Probably.” Marrion shook her head. “Though bears have been known to come Below for hibernation, and from the old accounts, they’ve occasionally been warped by the environment.
Hopefully we’re far south enough that we won’t meet one.
Worst case, we’re armed with cold iron. It’s not a flawless magical ward-all, but it should be enough to give any relics pause. ”
She took a knife from a hidden pocket in her robes and held the blade over her palm.
Her hand was still reddened and irritated from yesterday’s cutting, but the wounds had healed.
Now she cut into them again, incising neat lines until the blood flowed freely.
I watched as that strange, wide-open eye on her palm took shape again, and she dabbed some of the blood over her eyelids.
“The All-Seeing Eye,” she said, flexing her fingers and blinking the blood into her own eyes. “To peer into the echoes of the past, the residue of memories. My aunt improved upon the original sanguimancy, though it’s still costly in terms of blood.”
I was so entranced by this glimpse of sanguimancy that I almost didn’t notice the sudden shift in the air currents, nor the scent of pine and frost that washed over me
“You’re with me, fel Arron.” Wroth was scowling again, that omnipresent stormcloud hovering around him. He tipped his head, and I followed him and Marrion to the door opposite the one we’d entered through.
This one was also banded with cold iron, and Wroth went first, unbarring the door and carefully pushing through, his nostrils widening as he sniffed the air.
He gestured silently, and Marrion moved after him, her palm up, Eye facing outward.
“Nothing recent,” she said, her eyes going distant again. I wondered what she saw, looking at the world through a haze of blood.
“If we haven’t found any human signs by the time we reach the next bastion, we must consider tracing another route closer to Lonmire.” Wroth looked up, his eyes searching the dark crevices, and he waved to me. “But that could take weeks, with all the unwatched or hidden faerie mounds out there.”
I passed him silently, hiking my pack up on my shoulders and surreptitiously touching my breast pocket.
I’d scraped a bit of dust and earth from the floor of the bastion, and poured it into the chamber of a Pathfinder beetle, a creature of my own devising.
It looked like one of the scarabs of the Pharos desert, made of bronze and clockwork but for the malachite shell, which was actually a hollow chamber.
If I wound the beetle, it would guide itself back to the spot from which the earth had come, following the energies of the earth’s ley-lines.
Worst case, if I was separated from them, I could wind the beetle and find my way back to the first bastion. The beetle would be burned out afterwards, nothing more than a molten lump of metal, but it was better than nothing.
And there was Talos, following close on my heels. “Light, please,” I murmured to him, and the glass chestplate flickered to life. I would prefer to keep him in one piece, his secrets guarded, but if the relics Wroth had spoken of attacked, he would be my last line of defense.
His blue light cast over another cavern, snaking forward around blind corners.
It could have been natural but for the strange conglomeration of materials merged with the stone: here was a small patch of parquet flooring, and there an expanse of plaster wall merged into granite.
Looking up, I saw half of an ancient iron chandelier, hanging tilted at an angle, molten wax dripping down the side.
I could’ve ignored the strange merging of manmade and natural, but for the frenzy of marks gouged into the walls all around the bastion door.
I held a hand up to a set of lines that had been gashed with extreme force into the stone. Five lines, each matching my outspread fingers.
“Your kind, or theirs?” I asked Wroth.
He glanced at the lines, tail thrashing and ears going flat. “Theirs.”
“Ah.” I took my hand away, a shiver trailing through me. “Talos, go with Marrion. Light her way.” Gods forbid we lose our only sanguimancer.
Marrion wandered off, hand held high as Talos sulkily stalked her footsteps, and we followed. Wroth’s muscles were tense, every step soft. I wanted to speak and break the awful crushing silence of the cavern, but it was better to follow his example. He already thought I was spoiled and soft.
With an entire day of deadly hiking ahead of me, I set my mouth firmly and carried on.
But it was difficult not to speak. Especially when the cavern gave way to another stone hall for about five steps before it suddenly became a square garden courtyard.
In all four corners, a spindly, pale tree grew, its dagger-like leaves gleaming a pallid grey. Marrion marked the doorway with a sigil, eyeing the trees in a way I didn’t much like. With quick, doe-like grace, she crossed the pathway of stepping stones.
I gripped the straps of my pack with slightly clammy palms, looking down at the black grass growing around my feet. It came up to my ankles, and wavered oddly, though there was no breeze here.
“Don’t touch it,” Wroth said, giving me a glance of warning over his shoulder. He himself, with his bare, paw-like feet, was walking stone to stone, laid throughout the center of the garden like a paved path.
“How?” I asked him, watching with a sick feeling in my stomach as the grass wriggled under my footsteps. “How is it possible this is growing in the dark?”
“Nobody knows how the Fae did anything,” he said.
“Much of their occultism is beyond us. All we know—or suspect, at least—is that most of it was made with malice. Because if it wasn’t malice, then what the hell kind of things were they, really?
Who could live like this and enjoy it?” He laughed out loud, and I cringed.
That sound did not belong here. It felt like even the skeletal trees turned to look at us.
“Maybe they were masochists,” I muttered, trying to walk on the stones like Wroth and failing. His paw-pads gripped it in a way the soles of my boots couldn’t; I resigned myself to walking on the wriggling grass beside them with a quickness.
Wroth reached the far side, turned, and lunged back onto the stones. I froze as his claws dug into my waistcoat, and he practically ripped me across the last few feet of grass.
As soon as my feet hit the paving stones on the other side, trapped within the circle of Wroth’s arms, I turned to see that my footsteps had vanished. The grass had merely wriggled upright again, obscuring any sign that someone had crossed.
But the pale trees leaned inwards now, almost touching the stone path I’d followed, their leaves standing on end and quivering as they pointed directly at me. The rustling sounded like a nest of snakes. If they could have uprooted themselves to come after me, I truly believed they would have.
When I turned back, I found Marrion’s look of disquiet had become a little more wide-eyed, her dagger gripped firmly in her left hand. The fiend released me, taking a step back.
“Do you smell any humans here?” I asked Wroth bluntly, eerie fingers tip-tapping over my spine.
He couldn’t have dragged the truth from me with wild wargs, but deep down in my honest heart, I wanted to turn the corner and find Alvar and the people he had stolen, simply so I didn’t have to see anything more unsettling than moving trees.
If this was the black map, the most friendly place in the Below, then I could live without ever knowing what lay further beneath.
Less than a day down here, and yes, I fully understood why Wroth would cling to his throne through any hardship to keep his people from ever being exiled here again.
“You mean to tell me you’re not enjoying yourself?” he asked with a faint smile. I remembered then that he could likely smell the fear I was trying to hide as easily as I could smell apple tarts when I walked into the kitchen at home.