Chapter 12 #3
“What do you need, my favorite niece?” I asked, squatting beside her.
She opened her eyes and smiled weakly. “I’m your only niece. And if you happen to see any fine young men around willing to donate a mouthful or two, I’d be grateful.”
“He’s not fine, but he’s a young man.” I tipped my head towards Rasmus, who froze with his mouth full of bread, staring at Marrion.
Marrion cut him the most scathing glare I’d ever seen from her. If looks could kill, Rasmus would’ve keeled over in a blink. “I’d rather be thirsty than drink the blood of cowards.”
Surprisingly, the young coward spoke up for himself, his voice hot. “I had no choice.”
“We all have choices,” Marrion said flatly.
“You don’t understand what my brother would do to me—”
“But your hired workers—the poor men you likely gave no more than a handful of coppers to—had no idea what you would do to them, did they?”
Rasmus fell silent, nostrils flared, lips pressed so tight they turned white, but he couldn’t defend himself against the obvious.
“The knights are here,” Marrion said, her voice clipped, and she didn’t look at Rasmus again as she got to her feet and dusted herself off.
Nikos led the small legion down the path to join us, some hauling supplies, others on guard duty, swords drawn. Four knights left to enter the city. The rest remained somewhere above us to guard the bastions.
“We enter Liuridar as one,” I told everyone. “Across the bridge and into the city. You’ll lead, Rasmus.”
Fel Arron didn’t help Rasmus to his feet; he muttered something to her, and she said, as firmly as Marrion, “No one said you were evil. But the cowardice…that can’t be denied.”
Ha. So the puling little whiner didn’t receive the sympathy he desperately craved. Good.
Fel Arron drew her sword, and Marrion produced a long, wickedly curved dagger; I was armed with my own claws and teeth.
“Do not linger on the bridge,” I warned them, and pushed Rasmus through the crevice.
It hadn’t been a crevice before, but an arched doorway, beautiful in an alien way; the black powder had blown that beauty all to hell.
We walked onto a ledge overlooking a vast world, a wide, railless bridge before us. It was a perfect arch of glossy, smoky-dark crystal, shot through with thousands of veins of clear quartz.
Fel Arron sucked in a breath, looking up at the ‘sky’—a ceiling so far overhead it couldn’t be seen, but it twinkled with bioluminescent moss, like patches of false stars.
“By the Lady,” she whispered, the subterranean breeze blowing a stray curl across her cheek. “It is like a whole world.”
I held out an arm, blocking her from walking out. It was as wide across as a human man, barely enough for two to walk apace. And as Rasmus crept forward, his feet scuffing the bridge, bowed as though he carried a great weight, fulmen began flickering in the quartz beneath his shoes.
“Let there…be light,” I said.
The flickers of fulmen shot down the bridge towards the city, growing brighter until the entire city lit up with a pale blue glow. I turned to see fel Arron’s expression, and was almost taken aback by the fear in her eyes.
I was so used to seeing her nearly fearless.
In her spectacles, the vast, circular city squatting in the middle of the stygian rivers and lakes was reflected: enormous dark towers built one upon the other like termite mounds, balconies laced between them in osseous webs, ribbed domes and spires and narrow windows.
Organic, twisting, winding, the chthonium not shaped so much as grown. The towers did not look built so much as they seemed to be extruded from the plate-like isle of the city itself.
All of it was traced with veins of quartz, carrying the fulmen that lit the city of the Fae.
She licked her lips, her breath shallow. “I expected…ruins. Darkness.”
“No, and that’s the frightening thing about Liuridar,” I said. “It’s like it’s still alive…a city populated by the ghosts of the past.”
She peered over the side of the bridge, into black, fathomless waters, and took a deep breath. “It’s unexpected, that’s all.”
I ushered Nikos and Silvain after Rasmus, then Marrion, who was followed by knights Erland and Aleyn, and Talos. “Your turn, fel Arron.”
She nodded, jaw set, only slightly wobbly as she strode onto the bridge after her golem. Nobody lingered; the bridge itself was so thin and narrow, hardly more than a sheet of glass over the eerie river, that it discouraged the desire to dawdle.
I took to the bridge myself, bringing up the rear.
Rasmus was already to the city itself, his footsteps slowing as he looked about the empty streets awaiting us; the knights behind him ushered him forward, and Marrion was on their heels. Talos moved at an even pace, his wide strides eating the distance.
It was when fel Arron was halfway across that a sharp crack echoed over the city, and she froze in place.
Several dark shards of glass dropped from the bridge beneath her, falling to splash into the river.
“Wroth,” she said, her voice quavering and cracking. “The bridge…the black powder…”
And now I could see the fine cracks in the stone underfoot, an impact point on the bridge that hadn’t been visible from a distance.
I could only surmise that when Alvar blew the door open, parts of the ceiling must have fallen. Most of the larger stones had probably dropped into the river; but one had hit the bridge at the perfect point to weaken its curved structure.
And then I had sent a fucking iron golem stomping across it.
“Do not move, fel Arron.” My mind spun wildly, my own feet glued in place; everyone else had crossed with ease.
I was a gods-damned fool.
Another shard dropped away, the bridge groaning as the cracks shifted under her.
She couldn’t even look at me, unable to move so much as an inch.
“Fel Arron,” I said quietly. “You must go forward. Slowly, now—I will be right behind you.”
She nodded, trembling as she slid one foot forward. The scrape of stone on fractured stone was the loudest sound in the world, but the bridge held.
Another step, sliding carefully, her outstretched arm trembling.
Marrion, Rasmus, Talos and the knights watched with deep concern and dread—they’d found solid ground, standing in a defensive group on a balcony at the edge of the river. It was Talos who hesitated at the foot of the bridge, hesitantly making movements as though to come to her.
“No, Talos,” fel Arron breathed, and the golem let out an anguished mechanical shriek, abruptly cut off.
Fel Arron inched toward them, little by little. I could still reach her with one strong leap, but she was making progress.
She shifted her right foot, preparing to slide it, and the bridge gave way under her feet with another sharp crack.
A section fell away, fel Arron staggering as she tried to lunge for the other side of the crumbling bridge.
It gave way and she dropped, clinging to the jutting end of the bridge by her bare fingertips, scrabbling for a grip on the remaining crystal.
I leaped into the void, slamming into the other side of the bridge with claws extended. They scraped with a sound like rusty knives as I dug deep into the shattered stone, the sharp edges of the broken crystal cutting into my wrists, my body dangling over the abyss.
Her fingers gave out as I reached to scoop her up with my other arm—
I missed. My claws snagged cloth, metal, and a torn scrap of her sleeve.
She dropped out of sight without a sound. No scream, not even a gasp. She was gone that fast, in the blink of an eye.
I stared at my claws and the golden chain woven through them, her spectacles dangling and winking like a mockery.
The river rippled beneath me, rushing along, with no sign of fel Arron at all.