Chapter 10
Wroth
Ihad said too much.
Dragging the dead man behind me with an old iron hook, I scouted the path ahead with a scowl, wondering when I had lost my ability to keep my damn mouth shut.
One would think Kajarin had taught me the value of silence. Only a month in the grave, and already the old lessons were forgotten.
It was the woman’s fault. Fel Arron and her enormous doe eyes, never a sneer to be seen. Always smiling, even when I could see the scream building within her.
Damn brave Artificer. Selfless enough to join us in this darkness.
All the more beautiful for her total lack of consciousness of her looks, and her good nature…we might be half a league beneath the earth, but when she was around, it was like the sun still shone.
And none of it mattered because of those damned hateful Accords.
I had promised her father I would bring her out alive; I needed to keep to that promise, and that alone. There was nothing else I could give her. No other vows to keep, no pledges I could honor.
For Abelard fel Arron’s sake, not mine, I would get her out and see her safely home. The man had already lost enough.
For me, there was no future to be had with her.
She walked behind me, supporting my niece. Marrion had been shaken after living the echoes of the man’s death, and fel Arron gave her water and cool bloodpowder tea, wiped the sweat from her brow, and sat with her while Marrion recovered, murmuring soft encouragement.
Another black mark against her. Why couldn’t she be a selfish bitch, so I could easily hate her?
How dare you be cheerful and compassionate? Brave and intelligent? One would be bad enough, but all four is simply ludicrous.
I’d scavenged the large hook from the old cathedral, buried under a pile of rotting canvas and wood. It might have once been a fishing boat, but there was no cohesion left to the ruins of it, and it was impossible to tell for sure.
Like the Rift-kin’s superstitions in the north, the Rivers held its own cherished customs: to paint the hulls of their fishing ships yellow, supposedly to prevent a river current from wandering off into the liminal lands of the Fae, who had hated the hue of the sun.
There was no sign of yellow paint on this wood, which meant it either wasn’t a fishing boat, or there was in fact some credence to their superstition.
Either way, the hook was mine now, and when I returned to where fel Arron and Marrion sat well away from the body, I tied a rope to the end, then slammed the hook up under the dead man’s jaw, piercing him like a slab of meat.
Fel Arron stared at me like a wounded fawn. “Wroth, my gods…”
“We can’t touch him, and we can’t leave him.” Had she never seen violence? At least he was already dead. I smiled widely. “If it makes you feel better, consider that this man is likely one of those responsible for the fate of Lonmire.”
She blinked at the man, now skewered like a hog, and turned her head away with a harsh sigh. “I know.”
“Let’s follow his trail backwards. This is the first sign of human life, and wherever he came from, we’ll find Alvar.”
She nodded, helping Marrion to her feet, and whispered, “Lean on me,” to my niece. “We’ll be right behind you.”
I looped the rope over my shoulder, and began hauling the dead man back the way he’d come from, following the acrid scent of his fear, vomit, and blood up the crevasse.
He scraped along the ground, limp and heavy in death, and I heard the women whispering behind me.
“Do you still believe it’s Alvar lai Orros behind this?” fel Arron asked, her voice echoing off the stone walls. “I don’t recognize this man. As far as I know, he’s no nobleman I’ve ever seen.”
“It was unmistakably Alvar’s scent in Lonmire,” I called over my shoulder.
There was a dull roar from ahead, made louder by the echoes.
“But I smell only this man here. If he made it this far, this passage connects to wherever Alvar entered, and as soon as we find it…we’ll know how many men he brought.
I doubt other noblemen dared to come down—whatever this is, it belongs to Alvar and his hired men alone. ”
As I spoke, a cool breeze blew through the tunnel, brushing my mane back. A breeze scented with the old, dusty stone of the Below, of course, but it also carried the tang of human sweat and terror. A multitude of bodies…and the faintest hint of something sweet and rotten.
“Fuck,” I muttered under my breath, and fel Arron chirped, “What?”
I shook off the scents, sorting through them as I picked out the ones I wanted. “Humans. Men…mostly younger.” My nostrils flexed and flared as the primitive brain of a fiend tasted what lay ahead. “Some injured. One…familiar.”
Oh Mother Blood, let it be that bastard. Let us end it here before I drag her further into danger.
The crevasse ended abruptly, opening on an enormous chamber. I glanced back at fel Arron, who was taking it in with wide eyes.
To one unaccustomed to the Below, it must seem impossible for such places to exist beneath the earth, as if a god had reached down from the heavens and shifted the world around; I could fit three Owlhorn Castles within this place and have room left over.
Waterfalls poured over the face of the rocky wall far ahead of us. The floor was nothing more than a flat plate suspended between the walls, honeycombed with holes that opened to the river far, far below.
I stopped, looking out over the deadly landscape. “I believe these are the waters of the River Liuva, feeding into the abyss.”
Fel Arron peered into one of the holes, the golem at her side.
Its internal gears spun frantically, so fast they were nothing more than metallic blurs, and I almost expected smoke to start erupting from his joints.
The fulmen in his chest flickered brighter, a beam of blue light illuminating the dusty air all the way to the choppy waters below.
She swallowed audibly, even over the roar of the subterranean river. “By the Lady.”
“Back away from it, fel Arron,” I growled, all too clearly imagining that section of rocky floor giving way beneath her feet. “You don’t want to go down there.”
She did as ordered without arguing. “Do you know what lives in there?”
“This, to start with.” I spun, swinging both the rope and the dead man before releasing him.
His upper body juddered over the side of a hole, and his weight took him; he slid off with nothing more than a harsh scrape, his legs waving in the golem’s light as he went over.
Several long seconds passed, and a splash from below announced his final fate.
“Ah…he was evidence,” fel Arron said, wincing.
“He was also contaminated with miasma.”
“He’s right,” Marrion said, no longer leaning heavily on fel Arron.
Beads of sweat stood out like pearls on her pale forehead, but she had recovered her composure and stood up straight.
“The tincture we all took was enough to strengthen our blood against the effects of the miasma, but after long-term exposure…we would all die. He had to go.”
“And I smell humans.” I turned back to the waterfalls, breathing deep. Salty human sweat reached my nose, maybe a few days old at the most. “They’re near.”
Fel Arron tore her eyes away from the hole I’d shoved the corpse into, her mouth set. “Then let’s go. I want answers. I want to know if my people still live.”
I didn’t have the heart to tell her otherwise, leading them across the treacherous landscape.
The floor was uneven, and at times a footfall on a dark spot might reveal a much smaller hole; not enough for a body to slip through, but certainly enough to break an ankle.
The mule carts would have to be sheltered in the bastion behind us, and further supply runs done by the porters themselves.
I trusted Nikos and Silvain, my most experienced knights, to make the call.
On the far side, where the waterfalls trickled over the walls in an oily slick, we found a paved path, and here was where the scent was strongest. I crouched on the path, following the dead man’s trail of scent.
“Down,” I decided, following the slope of the floor with my eyes.
This chamber was not unknown to my kind.
It was also, interestingly enough, not one of the more dangerous places found in the Below, despite the river beneath us and the honeycombed floor.
If one crossed with care, they were unlikely to meet anything hungry in the middle.
The long-held theory, proposed particularly by Wyn, was that Fae-made relics did not like the running water.
It was also a chamber connected by many routes, and this paved path led upwards, diverging into a cavern that had once been accessible from a door near the banks where the rivers Liuva and Nicla split.
I had not thought to set a guard on that particular cavern, because we had blocked it long ago.
After the Accords had granted us freedom, it had been set with slabs of stone, the gaps filled with cold iron, and Pharosene concrete—a mixture of volcanic ash, small rubble and sand, and quicklime—had been thickly plastered over the blockade.
I supposed it was remotely possible that Alvar had heard of this entrance and chiseled it open. It had once been a great thoroughfare for the hunters of the Below, sneaking up toward the light to find sustenance.
Two hundred people could certainly have been herded through a passage of that size, with its smooth, even floors and switchbacks that eventually led to this chamber of relative safety.
And yet, when I turned my face toward that path, I smelled nothing but long-disused tunnels. I did not think Alvar had come this way. The dying man had found this place by mere accident.
Marrion left our sigil to guide the knights, and we followed the path deeper into the earth. The roar of the river and burble of the falls receded, and when we found ourselves in another tunnel that might have been carved by human hands, there was a dark opening.