Chapter 19 #2
With her blood gleaming wet and black under Liuridar’s ghostly lights, she raised her palm toward the Gates, eyes misting over. Marrion’s breath hitched, her hand wavering in midair.
“I see nothing living beyond the door,” she breathed.
Wroth was frowning at the Gates, and he abruptly strode down the too-high, too-wide stairs, crouching among the iron chains. He touched one, barely shifting it in the dust, and sniffed his hand.
I thought about teasing him, threatening to tie him up and ship him above if he tasted it, but as we drew closer to the Gates, my spit dried up in my mouth and all levity died.
It was only when we reached the landing, the dark wood and iron of the Gates reaching far overhead, that I realized I was nearly crouching, slumping beneath an intangible weight.
There was a dry click from my left as Rasmus swallowed, and Marrion shuddered and straightened her shoulders. I followed suit, feeling like an invisible hand had pressed down upon us all.
“Why is it so much worse here?” I whispered, my eyes tracing the trails of the dark chains. In some places they still gleamed silver, but they had been stained with something dark that flaked against Wroth’s fingertips. “We’re already in Liuridar.”
“Because this,” Marrion said, her voice equally quiet, “is where they lived. I see their shadows.” She trembled, almost inaudible by the end.
And I understood, finally, that what we had seen thus far—the liminal spaces of the Below, the orchards, the creature in the city, the will o’ wisps—none of these were truly Fae. They were incidental to their masters, nothing more than the faintest remnants of their projects left behind.
“They’re gone.” I put a hand on her shoulder, feeling the quivering down to her very bones. “They’re only shadows now.”
She blinked, those pale misty eyes gazing into the darkness beyond the Gates. “Even their shadows are terrible.”
“They broke the sanguimancy on the Gates with blood.” Wroth rose to his feet, lips curled back over his fangs.
“Innocent blood and tears of grief,” Rasmus said, his head tilted towards the chains, his eyes closed. “To dissolve this particular binding. I’m sorry to say this was…this was my fault. It was a charm covered in Occult Alchemy.”
“They would have needed less blood if they had a man’s unwilling seed, but Aunt Wyn has not seen fit to release that particular detail where just anyone could read it,” Marrion remarked. “Not even to the occult researchers of the Collegium.”
“Just so.” Wroth scowled, ears going flat against skull.
“And when we leave this place, I will tell dear little sister to keep her translations under lock and key, lest we have more short-sighted, idiot humans running amok, breaking every damn binding and releasing countless horrors into the world.”
And with that, he thrust his body between the narrow opening of the Gates, fading into the darkness beyond.
Marrion exhaled slowly, and followed him, and before I could let my courage falter, I forced myself to slide between the doors.
There was an oily feel to the iron-banded witchwood, unpleasant and strange. I brushed at the sleeve that had touched it, but the sensation simply transferred itself to my fingertips, no matter how hard I rubbed them on my breeches.
“Spell fragments,” Marrion said briefly, watching me rub my fingers together. “The binding on the door was a powerful one, and it fights against fading.”
Wroth stared into the darkness before us, and snarled out loud as a horrible, earsplitting screech filled the air.
We all whirled around, watching as Talos forced his iron and brass body through the narrow gap, until my golem finally shoved it open another few inches with mechanical strength. His face never changed, of course, but his irritation was obvious in his clipped movements and the set of his shoulders.
“Well, if anything is hiding here, it’s certainly aware of us now,” Wroth said dryly.
“Light, please,” I whispered, trying to ignore Wroth’s clear exasperation.
Fulmen flickered to life, lighting what lay beyond us.
At first, I expected more of Liuridar, the same chthonium walls and streets and dead glass orbs. But that odd phrase that had bounced through my mind before—biomachina, living machinery—was the only word that came to mind.
My eyes traced the ribs stretching from the ground to hold up the weight of the earth overhead. The ceiling was much lower, giving this part of the city a finite, cramped quality. The Gates had merely been the mouth; this was the gullet, descending into the guts of the beast.
Their homes. They were dark masses looming all around us, monolithic termite mounds of grotesque folds and ridges, chthonium pipes snaking among them like loose intestines.
I looked up at one of the hives, a dark wasp’s nest of lace and decaying bone, with the skeletal remnants of a tree growing up its side that had long since gone soft with rot.
Talos made a faint whirring noise as I reached out to touch the tree. It was ancient, dissolving into thick, crumbling dust under my touch.
The door, twice my height, had been left open. I motioned to Talos, and he aimed his fulmen-beam into the dark space.
I peered in, and had to take a moment to collect myself.
The life of a Fae had been left behind. And despite the essential otherworldly quality of it, some things were still recognizable: the flat surface of a table, rising on a single spindly leg; a cup-like protrusion in the wall that held still more dirt and a dead, vegetal skeleton.
They had clearly been great ones for gardening, the Fae.
The bed was less easily identifiable, but I eventually decided it was the metal chrysalis lined with rotting silk and linen hanging from the ceiling.
And all around these banal trappings of life were the signs of a life left hastily behind: scattered, corroded utensils that could only be silverware, a cup knocked over on its side, bits of fabric that had once been clothing left flung across the floor.
I didn’t even realize I’d walked inside until I looked up at the horizontal fans of black coral protruding from the wall, examining what sure looked like the kind of bookshelf I could find in any house in the Rivers. Maybe some things were universal across sapient species.
There were trinkets there, but no books. At least nothing I recognized as a book; I supposed there might be some things too strange to be recognizable, even if they appeared to have tables and shelves and even bathtubs.
I picked up a vaguely S-shaped bar of chthonium, pulling the two pieces of the smooth metal apart, and was astonished to find a blade.
The shape was smooth, finely curved, with no crossguard or ornamentation, somehow managing to be both minimal and yet more elegant in form than most blades I could purchase from the traders.
With a secretive motion, I sheathed the knife and stowed it in my boot.
And there, on the shelf above, was a piece of Artifice.
Caked thickly with dust, a hollow chthonium cube no larger than an apple, framed around a perfect sphere of cloudy, milk-pale quartz.
With my heart in my throat, I took the cube from the shelf, blowing away the dust. My shaking fingertip touched the sphere and it rotated within its cage, a soft glow emanating from within the stone, but images—runes or sigils, of a snake-like, undulating form—formed over the crystal as though burned there, black as ink.
I held still, and the sigils slowly faded, leaving the surface of the sphere unblemished. Another touch, and the sigils returned. I found I could rotate the sphere with my finger and more sigils would swim up from the depths of the crystal, replacing the previous ones.
My heart was pounding like war drums in my ear. Gods above fuck me, it was a piece of genuine Fae Artifice, perhaps even their version of a book. I touched the crystal again, sliding my fingers to make the sigils move.
“Jesamin.” Wroth’s voice held a warning tone, and I knew I was mere seconds from him assuming the authority of his lordship with me and giving a command.
And, wanting to put that off for a while longer, I immediately stepped back out of the house with the cube-sphere clasped firmly to my side.
“This is where they lived,” I said, dropping my pack just long enough to yank out a spare oilcloth and gingerly wrap the crystal-and-chthonium Artifice within it. “These were their homes, the place they came home to sleep at night. They lived…like us. Beds, tables, silverware…Artifice.”
Wroth gazed at me silently as I put the Artifice into my pack, his eyes flicking between my hands and the object as I cushioned it in spare shirts and breeches
“Do not make the mistake of thinking they were like us,” he said quietly.
“They slept. They ate. That out there—” I gestured towards the Gates with a wave.
“—that was their work. The building where we slept…there were the accoutrements of alchemists, but here is where they lived. That’s what the Gates are for.
To keep their human slaves out, perhaps.
Or their relics. This place was private, only for them. ”
As I straightened, readjusting my pack onto my shoulders, I saw Wroth and Marrion exchange a glance.
“Perhaps,” was all he said.
I felt a mild irritation that he didn’t seem inclined to explain himself, but then I saw the way they carefully didn’t look at Rasmus, and realized that it was because they didn’t want to speak of it in front of a man who might still be an enemy.
“Lead on,” Marrion said to Rasmus, and he, well aware that he was the interloper in the aborted conversation, frantically scanned the alleys between the hives before settling on a direction.
We followed, but not blindly. Marrion walked at his side with her Eye open, and Wroth hovered close to me. I had the strong suspicion he was preventing me from bolting into another house, though I had the itch under my skin to go digging for Artifice myself.