Chapter 20
Wroth
The reek of decomposition drifted through the tunnel ahead and my gorge rose at the thickness of it. Marrion’s nose seemed permanently wrinkled, her throat moving as she swallowed, but she kept her hand at the ready despite her wariness.
The knights looked just as reticent, none of them speaking, though I heard the occasional snort as someone tried to clear their nasal passages of the stench.
The two humans with us seemed to notice nothing at all.
“Do you not smell that?” Marrion demanded as I knelt before the open mouth of the dark tunnel, carefully picking up a small leather bag from the dust, and pulled out a gold coin.
“Hmm?” Jesamin looked up from the compass she clutched, her eyes a million miles away. “It smells bad, certainly.”
“What are we supposed to be smelling?” Rasmus asked, his eyes suspicious.
“Nothing good,” Marrion muttered, her brows drawn together in a furrow.
I examined the small gold piece. It was as bright as the day it was stamped, but unlike the gold marks of today, it was not embellished with the star of Argent.
No, this coin had the bust of a man stamped onto one side, a man whose name was long since lost to history, I suspected. The edges of his profile were worn. The other side possessed the Veladari coat of arms, unseen in human coinage since the rise of the vampires.
I looked up from the coin to find Jesamin at my side.
“It’s identical to the ones in his chest,” she said, peering at the coin. “That can’t be ours. Perhaps it’s Serissan? Is someone paying Alvar to do this?”
I flipped the coin, showing her the ancient coat of arms, a flowering wand crossed over a sword. “It’s of Veladari make. Roughly fifteen hundred years old, give or take a few centuries.”
“When were gold pieces ever stamped with a person?” she demanded. “You seem quite positive on the dating.”
I paused only briefly. It was an ugly history, and I had not spoken much of what little we knew to her, but if I trusted anyone with the knowledge, it was her.
“This was the crest of a human royal house.” I tapped the coat of arms. “We do not know why the majority of the Fae vanished, but some two thousand years ago, most of them disappeared, leaving behind their works and their chattel. The humans descended from those slaves rose above to create Veladar, and crowned a high king. Their rule lasted approximately six centuries or so, before Mother Blood returned to Veladar to create my people beneath the Rift. Whether intended or not, she unleashed us and began the Red Epoch, ending the reign of the human kings—and sealing her own species’ fate, when the royal highbloods of my people, her perfect creations, rose up against those Fae who remained. ”
Jesamin squinted at me. “How do you know this, exactly?”
“Some of the Master Historians of the Argent Collegium know, thanks to my sister Cirrien, a Scrollkeeper. She has translated many historical records from the High Tongue of my kind, detailing their rise and fall. What we lack is information on our progenitors, and what caused them to leave all this.” I waved a hand, indicating the hives and the sheer mass of chthonium.
“But, look here. The rowan wand, the primrose, and the cold iron sword—the emblems of the first human royalty, sworn to defend against the Fae. They had such a brief time in this world…for they could not have foreseen us being unleashed upon them by their former masters.”
“Who was he, then?” Jesamin asked, and I allowed her to pluck the coin from my claws to examine the man’s profile.
I shrugged one shoulder. “One of the high kings, but beyond that, I don’t know.
Cirri has pieced together some of Veladar’s history, but the specifics often elude her, as only so many records have survived this long.
Bring the coin home, and perhaps she will find you a name in time.
If nothing else, you can make a Historian positively scream with glee with the sight of it. ”
A soft hum of interest escaped her, and Jesamin eventually tucked the coin into the pocket of her waistcoat. “What would such a piece be doing down here, though? If I had been imprisoned here…” She shuddered. “Nothing would ever make me come back.”
“I don’t know.” I peered into the dark tunnel, my eyes adjusting until I could pick out the hundreds of footprints in the dust.
Ancient coins, from a forgotten time, buried down here and lost to the eons. I had never, in my time ruling the Rivers, seen a coin of such age, not even in the furthest reaches of the Treasury.
So I felt safe in assuming that the coins had been brought down here hundreds of years ago, if not thousands, and had never seen the light of day again. Stolen by a relic, or humans who thought to plumb the depths once more…
Or my people could have stolen this gold during the Red Epoch. A final, unpalatable, yet most probable option. I could envision a treasure trove of gold coins, ripped from the hands of a newborn, still-frail human society, to be melted down for jewels to adorn the throat of a vampiric empress.
We would never know, that was the hell of it.
No matter if every Historian came together to search, the history of Veladar was one fraught with conquerors, and the victors of those wars had wasted no time in burning the collective knowledge of their foes to ash.
Both humans and vampires had lost much in the last several millennia.
And I knew I was ruminating on this to avoid walking into that death-stinking tunnel with both the woman of my dreams and my precious niece. There would never be an answer to the gold, but Alvar must still be found.
“Marrion, close your Eye,” I ordered. “Talos and I will go first. And if I tell any of you to run, follow my orders without arguing.”
Marrion clenched her hand shut, nodding, and drew close to Jesamin and Rasmus. It was the smell, I knew; the gagging, cloying scent of decay that kept her quiet and on edge.
And Jesamin…I could smell the fear on her, but her eyes were focused and cool. She still held the compass from Alvar’s camp, the needle spinning so fast it was a blur.
I motioned to Talos, walking into the tunnel with his fulmen lighting the way.
Jesamin made a tiny noise behind me. “Biomachina,” she muttered. “By the Lady, I hate it. All that skill at forging chthonium, all the beauty in the world at their fingertips, and they chose this.”
Her word for it was good. It was clearly metal, clearly structured, tangles of chthonium piping snaking overhead, and yet that feeling of descending into abyssal innards persisted. I sneered at the ridged walls, glistening with humidity, and the thick layer of greasy dust beneath our feet.
Talos’s brilliant beam illuminated the footsteps. Alvar and his men had traversed this way many times; even his scent clung to the air, sweat and expensive cologne, though it was long faded.
The tunnel eventually split, dividing into six paths. Alvar had clearly taken each one, but it was the one to our left that held the most tracks, exposing the pockmarked floor beneath the dust.
I pondered our options, Talos humming and whirring at my side.
Nikos stepped up quietly. “Shall we check the other paths, my Lord?”
A part of me very much wanted to know what lay at their ends, but Alvar had clearly not found them worth his time, and beyond that, I was determined not to split our group further unless absolutely necessary.
When we apprehended Alvar, I fully intended to march every living human in his scheme back to the surface, and then load as much black powder as possible into the city and blow it all to hell.
If the mysteries of the Fae died with it, who would give a damn?
Well, the Historians would, and Cirri. And Wyn, but she was too mad at times for her own good. I would be doing her wife a favor, really.
“No. We carry on together and find Alvar.”
I gave a final glance around at the tunnels and the Fae inscriptions above them. The sigils were large and sinuous, unreadable to us.
But I heard the scratch of a pencil on paper as I strode forward, and knew Marrion was drawing as she walked, rapidly sketching out every instance of true Fae language for her mother.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Cirri one day laid a lexicon of Liuridar’s signage on my desk, though I thought this task might be beyond even my capable sister.
And if I had my way, we would have no reason to ever need to translate. I wanted this place buried and forgotten for good. Perhaps I could not destroy every Fae hive hidden beneath Veladar, but I could damn well find a way to annihilate this one.
The reek of rot grew stronger, and even my Jesamin made a noise in the back of her throat, raising her sleeve to cover her nose.
“Gods, what is that?” Rasmus choked, gagging.
For the first time, I felt for him. Deep in my heart, I knew we would soon find the corpses of Alvar’s crew, if not Alvar himself. And to find your brother dead…nobody deserved that pain.
The tunnel opened to a room, and fulmen flickered through the ceiling overhead. We all stopped, staring at what lay before us.
The room was circular. It was like walking into the center of a pitch-black egg, the point of the ceiling terminating in an orrery of ghost-lights, and before us lay a vast pit.
Much to our dismay, the brilliant orrery, depicting a constellation I’d never seen before, illuminated what lay within the pit.
Bodies. Hundreds of bodies—no, thousands. So ancient and desiccated they were hardly more than tangles of dry, age-browned flesh and ivory bone. I peered over the edge, astounded.
The quantity of death within this pit was breathtaking. I, who had seen bodies piled like cordwood during the Forian War, was appalled by the endless tangle of limbs and teeth below. Gods only knew how deep it went…possibly to the bowels of hell itself.
“Their…human slaves?” Jesamin asked, and even her bare whisper bounced off the empty walls.