Chapter 11
Jesamin
He was watching, a hulking, pale wraith in the shadows, but I could feel his eyes moving over me.
Every tiny twitch in my expression, every movement I made—even the racing of my heart—was being examined, weighed, and judged by the fiend.
I wished I could simply ignore him, but every cell in my body was conscious of Wroth’s presence and scrutiny, and reacting to it.
When he slipped behind my back, my skin pebbled and the fine hairs on the back of my neck rose.
When he was just out of sight, a flicker in the corner of my eye, I couldn’t help but turn my head.
And it was irritating the hell out of me, because I needed to focus on extracting every detail from Rasmus lai Orros.
He was huddled by the fire, shivering under a blanket and staring into the flames with his eyes a thousand leagues away. I’d heated broth in the kettle, forcing him to take small sips so as not to make himself sick, then rinsed the kettle for some good tea.
Wroth and I had entered the next bastion with a sullen silence growing between us. Once it was cleared and declared secure, Marrion had marched the prisoners in, all of them wide-eyed with horror and yet unable to resist the commands transmitted through those fine filaments of blood.
It was horrible to see, but I reminded myself that these men had, in some as-yet-unclear way, caused the incident in Lonmire. Not one of them was likely to walk free again.
But the sight of a bloodwitch so casually taking control of a human being’s body, dancing them along like puppets, sent a shudder through me that I couldn’t quite suppress. It was a reminder of just how helpless a human was against a vampire.
Fortunately the first group of knights, with the barrels of dry goods strapped to their backs, had caught up to us, and they had roped the men into a group, wrists bound and ankles hobbled.
Marrion had withdrawn her blood threads from their veins.
Now they sat in a frightened cluster, fed plain bread and water, awaiting their sentences.
I had quickly made a fire for myself, laid out my bedroll, and fed Rasmus.
It was a far cry from the meals we once shared in the Collegium, but it was the easiest way to manipulate him into opening up to me.
I did my best to cling to that thought, because I would’ve preferred punching him in the face several times for getting involved in this.
“Here, Rasmus, have some more tea. It’ll warm you right up.” I kept my voice gentle and pleasant, filling the tin cup and passing it over. He took it with a shaking hand, muttering his thanks under his breath. At the corner of my eye, Wroth paced, his eyes on my fingers.
Gods, but Rasmus was in terrible shape. He’d always liked fine clothes, and the ones he wore were torn and stained with filth, his dark curls limp with oil and sweat. Dark circles were carved under his eyes; his skin, usually a warm olive tone, had gone pale and ashen.
He looked like a man who had been trapped in hell with no way out.
I shouldn’t have been so surprised and disappointed to see him. Since I first laid eyes on that oil in the chthonium device, and Wroth had told me he scented Alvar, the spoiled golden boy of the lais, I had hoped against hope that Rasmus was not involved.
It was just so…unlikely. Although we attended the Argent Collegium for different reasons, we were both nobles from the Rivers, and had moved in the same circles.
And not once, in all our years there together, had I ever seen Rasmus be cruel to someone.
Not so much as a single snide remark. He went out of his way to help others, unself-consciously and without vanity.
So to see him here, in these forbidden depths, associated with something terrible…it simply did not add up.
Rasmus looked up from his tea with a jerk, as though something had startled him. He blinked around the bastion, taking in Wroth, Marrion, the prisoners, the knights.
“Jes, where’s Renaud?” he asked hoarsely. “Is he here, too?”
It was the last thing I expected him to ask, but shocking in a way I didn’t expect.
For the first time in a year, when I heard Renaud’s name, I didn’t feel that fracture inside me tremble and widen, threatening to swallow me whole. Instead I felt a brief shiver of dismay, and then nothing at all.
How odd.
But more to the point… “The betrothal ended a year ago,” I said. “We haven’t spoken since. Rasmus, how long have you been down here?”
He blinked at me. Rasmus had dark eyes, the irises nearly black, and with those heavy lids he’d always had a bit of a come-hither look to him. Now he just looked lost and stunned, the whites showing all around.
“I…a year?” he asked uncertainly. “A whole year? The last time I spoke to Renaud…he was traveling back to the Rivers for you…and I was on my sabbatical from the Collegium, working for lai Heriot. How could…how could so much time have passed? It was only a few months ago.”
I couldn’t stop the bitter smile from curling my lips. “No, he was coming home to ask me to set him free without guilt. But Rasmus, that was a year ago. I thought you had traveled to Serissa and Pharos as part of your Mastery.”
He shook his head slowly. “No, no…I was working with the lai Heriot alchemist to prepare for my Mastery trials, and—he enlisted me for an expedition around midwinter. They needed an alchemist. I thought, where better to improve my Mastery than in the Below? The Fae were master occultists, but perhaps they knew alchemy as well. If there was something to be found here, well…I wanted to be the one to find it.” He flushed, staring down into his tea cup.
“I wanted the credit. I freely admit it.”
I thought of how I had been down here only a day or so, and that brief span felt stretched over weeks. Midwinter had been less than six months ago. Perhaps he had genuinely lost all concept of time, lost in the strain of preparing for a Mastery test, and then being sucked into the darkness Below.
“But you didn’t come alone,” I said gently. “Who formed this expedition and pushed you into coming down?”
We knew damn well Alvar was involved, and if Rasmus lied about that…Wroth would take him.
My intuition said that Rasmus had been deceived—that the opportunity of a lifetime had been dangled under his nose, and in the thrill of thinking he would make alchemical strides above his peers, he had simply sunk too deep without realizing it.
But if I was wrong, I didn’t want him to clam up and refuse to speak. Better to nudge him along, giving him the excuse to be the victim, if it meant he’d speak openly.
I felt manipulative and dirty, but I thought of those stunned children sitting in my house, the eerie, empty roads of Lonmire, and held fast.
Rasmus licked his dry, cracked lips, then took a huge swallow of tea, choking and coughing.
I gently thumped his back and he finally whispered, “Alvar. My brother. He’s friends with Cadell lai Heriot.
Just after the winter solstice, he said he’d.
..finally found a door to the Below. He went down with a crew of men and they found new tunnels.
Alvar insisted we go deeper. He had hired a crew for the digging—he said there was a path the vampires had closed off, and there were riches inside, old spells and charms, and even…
even alchemical formulas. The formulas would be mine. I did all this for fame and money.”
His voice cracked and he sobbed once, biting down hard on his knuckle to stop himself. I refilled his tea, staying silent.
Rasmus finally took a deep breath, and closed his eyes before continuing.
“There’s a city below us, Jes. Not a cave.
Not a tunnel. A whole…a whole fucking city, like an entire world down there.
Alvar’s crew has been excavating for months.
He brought me a device he found. I was going to write to you, Jes, and ask you to look at it, but…
but I lost track of time. It’s so hard to keep track of the days down here.
I was to brew a formula that could be finely dispersed, and load the device… ”
“What was the purpose of this formula?” Voice low, eyes soft. I behaved like I was approaching a wild animal, and any sudden movement or harsh sounds would stop the flow of confessions.
“To make people suggestible.” Rasmus opened his red-rimmed eyes, staring at me.
“It worked. It was so easy, Jes. Thornapple, devil’s breath, the spines of a porcupine fish, and a few other odds and ends I found down here.
I’ve discovered so many useful things here.
I tested it on one of the men, and he…he was like a lump of clay.
He would simply stand there, staring, and we could move him about by prodding him.
If put on a line, he could be led like a docile cow.
After about twelve hours, the tincture worked its way through his system, and he returned to normal without any side effects. ”
Sickness burbled in my stomach, rising with an acidic bubble. Rasmus, who had never done a cruel thing in his life, had turned two hundred people into spiritless living dolls to be led on a line to the Light knew what fate.
“Why did he have you create this?” I asked, struggling to keep my voice calm and breathing even.
Rasmus shrugged and shook his head. “In the event that someone discovered our dig site, it was to be used to painlessly stop them, lead them out, and we would block the entrance they had used. They would wake, unharmed and none the wiser, and believe it all to be a waking dream. Alvar took the device and the tincture to set at a critical junction, but it hasn’t gone off, as far as I know. ”
I stared at him, unable to form words. Did he truly have no idea of what his creation had been used for?
I busied myself with refilling my cup and sipping my tea for the sole purpose of hiding my expression from him. He was either dangerously na?ve, or a dangerously good liar.