Chapter 22
Wroth
The laboratory was a never-ending hell, made no easier by the desire to check over my shoulder every few minutes.
Gold-hearted Jesamin. Dearest one, beloved. How many others would risk their lives, possibly their sanity, to save another human down here?
I could think of few. Even my people, back in the days of despair, would have left a friend behind if it meant living to see another day, let alone daring to touch Fae Artifice to save another.
Líadan’s hobbling pace slowed us, but I bit down on the regret over what we’d done.
Hers was but a single life saved, and if that kept Jesamin from falling apart if we found none of her people…
then it was a worthy risk. Let her find one victory in this entire catastrophe, one good deed to hold close to her wounded heart.
But I did not trust this woman, and to let Jesamin support her, practically dragging her through the corridors of corpse-filled aquaria and broken glass, when Líadan could at any moment choose to act against her, sent prickles racing up and down my spine.
There was something about her scent that made my hackles rise. Of course she reeked of Liuridar and the bitter fluid she’d been submerged in, but it was something else underneath that astringency, something unfamiliar and strange.
I peered around a corner as the tunnel curved, looking upon what my eyes immediately took as coffins, but on second glance, the organic lines made them look more like chrysalises.
Chthonium chrysalises hanging from the ceiling, entangled masses of pipes curling around them and dripping fluid into holes so tiny as to be invisible.
Each one had a smooth quartz stone embedded in its foot, some of them glowing a pale blue, but most of them cracked and dark.
The soft glug-and-hum of fluids moving through pipes emanated from those whose stones still glowed.
Nothing moved; I waved them on, peering at a chrysalis laying on the floor whose top had split wide open, revealing a pool of inky, opaque liquid.
The pipes overhead were still dripping, plinking into the rancid pool and sending out viscous ripples.
The black ooze had overspilled the open chrysalis, drying on the floor in irregular dark splotches.
Jesamin stopped when Líadan gasped, looking over the rows of chrysalises with their shattered lights. Her dark eyes were wide, a hand pressed to her mouth.
“Oh, I don’t like this,” Jesamin breathed. She gave the open chrysalis on the floor a wide berth, guiding the trembling woman past them. “These strike me as more…functional. They weren’t used for slaves, that’s for sure.”
“Touch nothing,” I warned her, though I thought the open chrysalis held nothing more inimical than that noxious liquid now.
We moved past them quickly. Several more rooms held the same chrysalises, the crystals glowing gently, with cylindrical aquaria shoved aside to make room for them.
I had the distinct impression that many of the tanks that had held things like Líadan and the warg had been hurriedly cleared away to grow the chrysalises instead, the same sense of frantic rush found in the abandonment of their hives.
As we found an intersection with no clear-cut path before us, there was a tremble underfoot. Líadan stumbled, and Jesamin reached out to steady her, both of them looking up at the same time that the fulmen flickered above us.
“That feels like…like a crystcore,” Jesamin said, her voice trembling as much as the floor. “It's like the power is surging…”
The ghostly lightning in the quartz veins died and revived, over and over, casting us in flashes of pitch-blackness and bright ghostly light. The rumble in the floor carried on for several long moments before dying out, and as it steadied, so too did the flow of fulmen.
We all looked at each other in silence until Jesamin frowned up at me, her brow twitching. “Do you hear that?” She spoke so quietly she was almost inaudible, visibly straining to listen.
I twitched an ear towards the sound. There were voices echoing through one of the tunnels, the high strain of fear and stress warping it out of recognition. I pointed at the ground. “Stay right here.”
I listened again, hearing a sound I thought might be Marrion…screaming.
The prickles on my spine became ice in my gut, but I forced myself to pinpoint it, walking down the tunnels until I was sure I had located the right one.
Jesamin had obeyed, not moving an inch until I waved her towards me. “Follow as quietly as you can.”
She nodded, face white, and adjusted Líadan’s weight to her other side so she could draw her pistol.
I did not look at the aquaria or the chrysalises as we passed. Everything was a blur, a distant background to the horror I was sure we would find ahead.
And when we entered a larger laboratory, the floor sparkling with glass shards, a freshly-shattered cylinder dripping clear liquid everywhere, the thing in scarlet standing in the center of the room whirled to face us with a shriek of pure rage, a thousand bloody tendrils rising from its back and arms like an eldritch halo.
Jesamin’s pistol rose, pointing at its heart, but she dropped it before I had time to even comprehend what I was looking at.
Marrion, clothed in blood. Her eyes burned amidst the crimson, but she froze, each tendril of blood swaying, wavering in anticipation, as she blinked at us.
Her mouth fell open and she dropped her arms, all the tendrils dissolving at once and splattering to the floor around her.
“Uncle,” she said, and it was the little girl’s voice I heard, the one who had climbed my back and tried to hide under my mane when she thought she was in trouble.
She looked down at the floor, the blood expanding into scarlet flowers in the pool of liquid around her feet. “Oh, gods, I could’ve killed you.” She sank to her knees, covering her face with her hands.
I hurried to her side, pulled her from the bloody, ice-cold liquid, and made her sit on a patch of dry floor, well away from the dead thing slumped in the base of the broken cylinder.
Jesamin leaned in with a handkerchief, wiping blood from Marrion’s face with the gentleness of a mother, and I was more grateful to her in that moment than I could ever explain.
Marrion stared at me for a long moment, with absolutely no sign of real awareness, and the icy fist wrapped around my guts clenched.
“Marrion?” I asked, touching her hand, and she suddenly jerked back, arms flailing, and let out a long shriek before she stilled. She closed her eyes, rocking back and forth.
The silence was filled with panting breaths, and Marrion began counting under her breath, only opening her eyes again once her breathing had slowed.
“Aunt Wyn was right,” she said, her voice hollow. “This place is hell, and none of us should’ve come here. Knight Aleyn is dead.”
I looked down with a sigh. I had known some of us would die. I had asked, not ordered, because every knight who accompanied us Below was looking his own death in the eye.
“How?” Jesamin asked. She had soaked a fresh handkerchief from her water flask, and was gently wiping Marrion’s hands clean now.
“He’s…right over there.” Marrion’s lower lip trembled, and she bit it hard. “I killed him.”
The sight of Marrion extruding a thousand tendrils of blood from her own flesh was burned into my mind, and I got up, intending to see what had sent her into such a state.
Most bloodwitches were cautious with such large-scale works.
It was entirely possible for a sanguimancer to pull every last drop of blood from their own body and perish.
When I found Aleyn’s corpse, I understood why she reacted with such overkill.
I returned to them. Jesamin was handling everything with calm professionalism. I watched as she cut her own wrist with a knife, bleeding into Marrion’s cupped palms.
“How did it happen?” I asked, crouching before Marrion.
She lapped Jesamin’s blood from her hands unself-consciously, a semblance of her usual composure returning to her.
“We’ve been following your blood charm, but we were separated a room or so back.
Nikos went right, and I think Talos and Rasmus went with him, but…
there wasn’t much time to make a decision, and we could only go left, Aleyn and I.
The carrion-feeders were coming. We found this…
strange laboratory, but there was a deafening noise, and the doors closed behind us.
The fulmen was going mad, flickering on and off.
” She took a deep breath, then licked her palms clean.
Horror saturated me; I was now sure that awakening Líadan had somehow affected the flow of occult energy, and it might have gotten Marrion killed.
“We were moving slowly, so I was trying to make notes as we went. Aleyn was clearing the rooms before I came in, so I had plenty of time. But it wasn’t until we got here that Aleyn…
touched something.” Marrion looked at one of the tables and shuddered, but her voice clarified, growing stronger and more sure of herself as she related the story.
“I don’t think he meant to. He turned around, brushed an alembic with his hand, and…
that was it. He started changing immediately, and I had very little time to react.
There was roughly a thirty-second window when he seemed to be aware that he was infected, but he was still growing, and his mental faculties seemed to decline in direct proportion with the change of his body mass.
Shortly afterward, I determined him to be extremely hostile and terminated him. ”
I nodded gravely. Yes, Aleyn had changed, all right. There was nothing recognizable of the young knight in the massive, hunchbacked form curled on its side, the bones grown so long they jutted from the suppurating flesh like knives.