Chapter 23 #2
And Alvar lai Orros sat on the floor of this strange room, an explosion of tools arrayed around him, feverishly digging in the innards of a piece of chthonium Artifice by the light of a miner’s lantern.
I remembered the man from the Collegium. White smiles, gleaming golden hair, never a single fleck of dust daring to cling to his couture.
Now he was thin as a rail, his blond locks greasy, his mouth set in a sunken grimace and deep lines carved about his eyes.
He selected a tiny wrench, hunching over the strange, bowl-shaped black device and licking his lips with nervousness.
As he moved, I caught a hint of black metal around his throat.
I almost went in, prepared to whip my sword against his throat and march him straight to Wroth to face justice.
Here he was, the man behind this whole insane escapade, hiding in a boudoir in the depths of Liuridar, doing gods only knew what.
It was infuriating, almost offensive, to believe this greasy-haired, sunken-mouthed man was the reason two hundred of my people had been turned into pulp and spread like fertilizer among those hell-trees.
I tasted blood in the back of my mouth, imagining…oh, just slipping with the blade, and ending it all here. There was no justice that could match his crimes.
But behind Alvar, facing a floor-length mirror propped against the wall, stood something that wasn’t human.
And as I watched, a terrible relief flooded through me that I hadn’t given myself away in a fit of righteous fury.
He had simply blended into the shadows at first. Alvar was lit by the miner’s lantern, but the light was directed away from the thing behind him. The shape was clad in dark, sheer robes that couldn’t disguise the pallor of his corpse-pale flesh, and he loomed as tall as Wroth.
A sheet of black hair down his back. Even slightly stooped, his limbs were far too long, his feet massive and gnarled with veins.
A large, spidery hand moved from the robes, and he leaned forward towards the mirror with a too-long, too-flexible neck, the light catching the knife-like edge of his long, pointed ears.
My breath caught, my heart pounding in my ears with a sickening beat.
This was not a relic. Not a leftover creation, but one of the creators.
The Fae’s face was stretched and sharp, almost mask-like. His fingers, jointed in four places, touched his hollow cheek, tracing downwards to the corner of his thin-lipped mouth, where a trickle of dark blood smeared from several tiny sores.
His eyes were an owl’s eyes, enormous and dark, almost perfectly round.
The Fae slowly straightened, wiping away the blood and peeling the front of his robe open. A series of small, dark bruises marred his pale chest like a splatter of ink, and he touched them with a frown.
Then he opened his mouth and spoke. His voice was an awful chorus, high and low tones laid one over another like three mouths speaking at once, and he spoke Veladari.
“Slave.”
Alvar cringed, nothing more than a whipped dog. He dropped his wrench and scrambled to his feet to approach the Fae. He looked like a child next to the thing.
The Fae indicated the bruises, and Alvar obediently inspected them, his entire body quivering.
“It…it just looks like bruises,” he whispered, frantically licking his lips and unable to meet the Fae’s wide-open owl eyes hovering before him. “I’m not a healer. I don’t know.”
“Bruises,” the Fae repeated. The word sounded clumsy in his tri-toned voice, his tongue fumbling the sounds, but instead of coming across as comical, it was terrifying. He caressed the sound, feeling it with his mouth, an almost tangible sensation of curiosity and frustration.
Alvar made several aborted gestures, finally holding out his own arm.
He was green and purple to the elbow, marked with fingerprints that would match a large, inhuman hand.
“Like this. Just a bruise. It’s…nothing to worry about.
Nothing bad. It will heal.” He was almost whispering, as though terrified to raise his voice.
The Fae cocked his head, regarding Alvar’s arm. He touched the bruises on his own chest once more, shook his head once, and flicked a finger.
It was a gesture of dismissal. Alvar threw himself back down before the Artifice with visible relief, and the Fae turned away from the mirror.
I thought my heart would explode as I waited for him to come towards the door I hid behind, my body tensing to run or fight, but he merely crossed the strangely-decorated room and sat on one of the wooden chairs, carefully arranging his long limbs as he watched Alvar.
He was learning from him. The Fae tried several positions, mimicking natural human poses: resting an elbow on the table, extending one leg, leaning backward and then forward again.
Every so often Alvar would swear under his breath, and the Fae would repeat it silently, his mouth and tongue wriggling as he mouthed modern words.
It was awful, this creature imitating him like a child.
I heard a door open, and another filthy man came into the room from an unseen corner with blank eyes and wooden motions, carrying a bowl piled with fruit.
Taut, fleshy, dripping fruit. Familiar fruit. He laid the bowl on the table before the Fae, bowing and scraping his way backwards. He also wore a chthonium collar; neither he nor Alvar acknowledged each other.
The Fae selected a fruit, his multi-jointed fingers creeping over it with eerily individual motions, as though each finger had its own mind. He bit into it, revealing the meaty red interior.
“How much further?” the Fae asked, examining the fruit’s pulpy flesh.
The other man shook his head, quivering. “Very close, my lord. Daniau says we are almost done. But the men are getting sick.”
Alvar looked up, and for the first time, I saw a hint of the man he used to be, the cold contempt in his gaze. I sucked in my stomach, doing my best to flatten myself against the wall. “Daniau could have made it through that rock days ago,” he hissed. “Just use the damn black powder.”
The Fae leaned forward, chuckling, and Alvar immediately shut up. His mouth literally snapped shut, teeth clacking, his skin gone deathly white.
“No, no, Alvar,” the Fae said, drawing out the harsh consonants with a roll. And then the fulmen surged, and he smiled before the room was plunged into darkness, revealing just a flash of eerily identical flat teeth. Each tooth was exactly the same size as the others.
“We must keep it whole,” he whispered in the shadows. “Swiftly. Others have come. Finish dig.”
“Digging, my lord,” Alvar corrected, his voice strained as though he were trying not to vomit.
I swallowed, praying they wouldn’t hear it in my throat.
“Digging,” the Fae repeated obediently, feeling that word, too.
I closed my eyes briefly. Digging through stone, and the men were getting sick.
A crystcore. I felt its weight all around us, this far in the depths, so heavy that every breath felt like being crushed with a boulder.
A curse-stone that could power a city…a city made of one piece of Artifice.
“I will see it.” And as soon as the Fae said that, the fulmen flickered back on, the pressure of the crystcore subsiding. “I will go…see Daniau. We leave soon.”
In the moments of darkness he had gotten up from his chair, moving so lightly despite his size that I hadn’t heard him move at all. He was now crouched over Alvar, who sat frozen. The whites showed all around his eyes, staring towards the doorway I hid in.
“Alvar,” the Fae whispered, dragging his fingers through Alvar’s greasy hair in a sickening caress, as though feeling the contours of the skull beneath his hand.
“Slave. Be good, and you come home...with me.” He added more in the fluid language of the Fae, two of his fingertips poised like scorpion tails over Alvar’s eyes.
Alvar nodded frantically, snorting rapid, panicked breaths through his nostrils as he stared at the fingertips aimed at his irises. The Fae released him and stalked out, still hunched over and arms curled to keep his hands from dragging on the ground, after the man who had delivered the fruit.
I counted to sixty in my head, nearly slumping with relief at his continued absence. I had half expected him to come bursting back in, maybe just to keep Alvar on his toes, but after another minute or two without the sound of anyone returning, I believed he had truly left.
And then I perked my ears, listening to the silence. No panicked hyperventilation, nor the rhythmic scrape of tools. Absolute silence.
A body slammed around the corner, crashing into me. A hand wrapped around my throat, the other holding an awl, poised to stab into my eye.
The reek of piss, terror, and body odor almost made me gag. I swallowed bitter saliva as Alvar, his lips drawn back over his teeth in a snarl of fear, the awl shaking wildly, shoved me up against the wall.
There wasn’t the slightest hint of recognition, but of course there wouldn’t be.
I was as far below Alvar as an ant was beneath a man.
Not even my high marks in the Artificer’s Guild had been a cause for his attention; he too held a Mastery, and he had the pedigree and the gold to set him higher still. I doubted he had any idea who I was.
The golden boy of the Rivers, once jealously coveted by every young noblewoman, once loathed and envied by every young nobleman, stared at me like salvation itself, his fingers scrabbling over my collarless throat.
“Whoever the hell you are,” he said, his voice hoarse and his breath like death itself, “get me the fuck out of here.”
“Take the awl out of my face, and I will,” I whispered back, not daring to move with that sharp point so near my eye.
Alvar held it poised for a long moment, face contorted with desperation and horror, and finally lowered his hand, but the other remained on my throat. “Are there others? Who else is with you?”
“Yes.” And then I lied without a hint of guilt, thinking of the letters I’d given to Wroth. “Nathanael lai Auvray sent us. He was concerned at the recent lack of communication.”
Alvar closed his eyes, but tears crept from under his lashes. “Oh, thank all the gods.” A sob swelled under his words. “Let us hurry.”
“I came down through a crematorium.”
Despite his bone-deep fear, he managed a scoff. “There’s a stair. It goes all the way to the surface.”
“Show me.” I waved him towards the darkened rooms I’d crept through. “I’ve got your back. They’re waiting for us now.”
Alvar didn’t bother with thanks, or even a show of camaraderie.
He was perfectly happy to let me take any surprise attacks from behind as he skittered past the crematorium, turning into another shadowy hall that ended in a chthonium door.
Prickles inched down my spine, awaiting a huge, spidery hand from the darkness that would probably rip my spine out.
“Here,” Alvar said, fidgeting in place as he stroked his fingers over the door, and it slid open to reveal stairs well-lit by veins of fulmen. “We’ll need some tools. Only chthonium can cut chthonium, and I need this damn collar off, or he’ll be able to find me.”
I thought of the chthonium knife in my boot. “We found tools,” I said, unsheathing it carefully by the flickering light off the stair outside the door. “Come here, quickly.”
Alvar’s eyes lit up at the sight of the knife, and he eagerly tilted his chin up, holding the collar away from his throat. “If you cut me—” he started to say, and it was only the strength of my need to get him out of here that kept me from rolling my eyes.
“Just hold still.”
I wished I had tested the knife earlier; I wondered if I could’ve cut my way through the door to Wroth.
With tiny, careful sawing motions, I split the thin ring around his throat, watching with concern as a few small sparks shot out from the broken band.
We rotated it and I sawed the other side, and the sparks died out, leaving me with two half-circles of chthonium in my hands.
Alvar rubbed his naked throat, silently crying again. “Take me to Nathanael, woman,” he commanded in a thick voice, his back straightening. “Protect me, and there’s a fortune in it for you.”
“He’s in the laboratories above us.” I stepped through the door, finding myself on a wide landing with a set of stairs wide enough to accommodate ten men before me. The steps were not made for human legs, the risers too high and spaced too widely, but Alvar seemed confident as he began to climb.
He looked back once or twice, twitching as though he expected the Fae to be climbing after us. It was the third time he turned back that he stopped, his eyes moving over me in the bright light of a fulmen surge.
“What is that?” he asked sharply.
His eyes were glued to my throat. To the beautiful silver constellation Wroth had left on my skin.
I could’ve been imagining things, but his face seemed to turn several shades whiter. I smiled, shoved his shoulder to face him forward and marched him up the stairs with the chthonium blade angled towards his back.
“That’s my blade at your spine,” I whispered as I forced him up the steps. “Do you feel it?”
He nodded, whimpering as he climbed another step.
“Good. I will sever it in a heartbeat if you give me a reason, and leave you for your master to find. So if you want to get out of here, you’re going to tell me everything.”