Chapter 24 #2
“We dug down through the city, past those big doors, and found a way into their occult laboratories,” Alvar said bitterly, hunched over and inching away from Jesamin, who watched him with a calm sort of fury as she chewed.
“A way to bypass the corpse pit and get into the real troves. There’re things still alive down here.
There’s more fucking Fae still alive, sleeping away in their little insect-pods.
I wanted answers on how to use their Artifice.
So…” His lips crawled back over his teeth, baring them in a snarl.
“So I opened a chrysalis and woke one up.”
There was a lot to examine in that single, short explanation. As much as I wanted to interrogate him over every word, I focused on the single most important thing. “So there’s a living Fae, awake at this very moment.”
Alvar nodded shortly. “I thought we could…parlay. Trade for something to kill you, and by the Lady,” he gasped, snarling, “I only wish he had given me something, and I would have served him for life.”
“Mm. And rather, you found yourself enslaved, because in his eyes…you are no better than a trained animal.” I smiled at him pleasantly.
“It must’ve been interesting, to be on the other side of that mindset.
So when did you release him, precisely? At what point in time did you decide it would be a good idea to awaken a being that would look upon you as little more than a beast of burden? ”
Alvar shook his head warily. “A…a month ago. Maybe two. I don’t know. Time doesn’t have real meaning down here.”
“And what is he doing, now that he has a fresh stable of human hands under his direction?”
The arrogant man licked his lips, going silent. It was only when Jesamin raised her boot again, utterly expressionless, that he broke.
“We’ve been teaching him our language. Serving him. Feeding him. We’re digging up a…he calls it a selaroc.”
Líadan looked at him sharply.
“It’s a stone generating the energy the city uses to keep itself alive—”
“A crystcore,” Marrion said with disgust. “That’s why the weight of its presence has grown so heavy. We’re practically right on top of it, and he’s removing every barrier between it and us.”
I stared at Alvar, letting all pretense of civility leave my features, and he shivered. Just once, but it was enough. “Has he shown you the Artifice he intends to use with this crystcore?”
“Yes,” Alvar whispered.
“What is it intended to do?”
“It’s…” Alvar hesitated, and Rasmus made shooing motions, encouraging him on.
The elder brother slapped the hands of the younger one away from him, and the hurt on Rasmus’s face stirred a hint of pity, even in my withered heart.
“I think he wishes to leave. He wants…to go somewhere else, I think. And he wants his people. But he means to take the entire city. As I understand it, he can…with the crystcore’s power, he can move Liuridar. We’re standing in the Artifice itself.”
Jesamin looked strangely satisfied with this explanation, and I knew then that her concept had been correct: the city of Liuridar itself was one single piece of Artifice.
“Just to leave.” I pondered that. Leave for where?
And how? How did one move an entire city?
I imagined the earth collapsing as that massive plate of chthonium hives and towers rose from the abyss, collapsing the Rivers in its wake.
Would it tunnel? Creep on newly-sprouted legs?
Or simply rise, powered by occult energy, dislodging millions of pounds of stone and earth? It was impossible to imagine.
But nobody could answer that besides the Fae himself, and I had no intention of letting him live long enough to lay out any perfectly innocent-sounding plans for me, even if he could communicate in our language. Where the Fae were concerned, no one was innocent.
“I saw him, Wroth.” Jesamin met my eyes, her own dark and smudged with exhaustion.
“He’s…horrible. And there’s no telling what he could do before he leaves.
All of this—” She waved a hand. “—is his native technology. He could arm a thousand pieces of Artifice in the time it would take me to understand a single one, but that’s all he needs: one.
A single machina that could unleash hell on us all.
And if he can actually move Liuridar…whatever he intends to do with it could destroy the Rivers. ”
I heard her unspoken assessment: an agreement with my own private thoughts. But Alvar’s caginess bothered me, and like she was reading my mind, Jesamin turned back to him.
“What was that piece of Artifice you were working on?” she asked, turning her sharp gaze on Alvar.
He shrank under her direct stare, and despite my bleak thoughts, I found it rather amusing that he seemed more frightened of her than he was of me. I reined in my rage, determined to let Jesamin take the lead as she had with Rasmus.
“I…I don’t know…”
“No, I really think you do.” She leaned forward, and as if by magic, that chthonium knife appeared in her hand. She tapped the flat of the blade idly against her knee. “So speak up, before I decide that saving your life was a waste of my time.”
It was a side of her I had never seen before, as sharp as cut glass, as cold as the deepest winter’s winds.
I wondered exactly what she had done to Alvar that he would be so terrified of her. I also wondered at the surge of sudden lust I felt for her, watching as she threatened a man with a blade.
“It’s…meant to disperse compressed occult energy,” he said, aiming for an insouciant tone and failing miserably.
Jesamin tapped the knife again, and Alvar launched into an explanation that was beyond the inklings of mere mortals like myself, but she nodded, following every word.
The only words I recognized were phrases like “violent destabilization” and “cellular rending”.
“If I could’ve tapped into the selaroc’s energy, I might’ve been able to dissolve him, but he knew what it was. He took the core components and laughed at me,” he said bitterly. “I was hoping to salvage new ones while he was distracted later, but then you came.”
Jesamin leaned back. “Distracted by what, precisely? The dig?”
Alvar’s face twitched, and for a moment he resembled his brother, eaten alive by guilt…but brushing it off, as a horse swatted a fly with its tail. His face smoothed, becoming the contemptuous mask I’d watched form over the boy’s lifetime. “The livestock.”
Jesamin mouthed the word ‘livestock’, the confused furrow between her brows smoothing into horrified comprehension. “You mean…the people of Lonmire. You have survivors down here?”
For a moment, Alvar’s eyes might have been made of glass, staring a thousand yards and yet seeing nothing.
“The Master culled those he desired from the herd,” he said, staring at his feet.
“He wanted broken slaves so his people would be tended to when he woke them. The rest…I don’t know what happened to the rest.”
“No?” Jesamin asked softly, her voice the edge of a blade. “You didn’t notice that after they vanished, there were suddenly bowls of bloody fruit to feed your master?”
Alvar’s lips trembled and thinned. “I didn’t see what became of them. That wasn’t my job. My only task was to herd them Below and into the care of the orchard keepers.” He gagged midway through, recovering himself with a shudder. “I had to. He was hungry. I didn’t see. I didn’t know.”
“How many survivors?” she asked crisply.
“You have to get me out of here,” he insisted desperately, and she leaned forward with one smooth motion, the chthonium knife but a hair away from his throat.
“How many?” Jesamin asked, undaunted.
Alvar licked his lips again, mouth pinched. “Maybe ten. There were more, but a few were hurt on the way down, and…it’s not his job to fix them. If they die, he can always get more. He doesn’t care.”
“Where? And stop with the hedging. I want details, Alvar. If you want out of here, you’ll find it best to start making yourself useful.”
I watched them, considering what might happen if Jesamin cut his throat right here in front of us all, and deciding I didn’t much care about the consequences. She’d gotten far more from him than I would’ve, but then, to Alvar, I was an understood quantity, while she was a new and dangerous threat.
He exhaled slowly, watching the hand that held the knife. “The place where you found me connects to the selaroc vault, and has several rooms attached. I think the original selaroc minders lived there. He keeps the livestock locked in a room. Only the men wearing collars are allowed out—my men.”
“Good. You’ll guide us there, and show me to the crystcore vault.” Jesamin stood and shouldered her pack. “He knows we’re here, doesn’t he? That’s why the crystcore is surging. He’s waking up the Artifice.”
“I’m not going back down there,” Alvar shot at her, even as he quailed at her boots. “He won’t just kill you. He’ll put a collar on you. Or he’ll send you to the orchard keepers. I won’t fucking go.”
“You will.” Jesamin had entered that brutally calm state that only accompanies world-shifting rage; it was written in the distance in her eyes, the utter certainty of every movement. “You have no choice, Alvar lai Orros. I know you want to live. You want it desperately. But look around you.”
She smiled, gesturing to the stairs, the doors that branched into sprawling laboratories.
“In this place, there is Artifice that can keep you alive for a thousand years, and every single second of it will be torture. You will never know another moment of comfort or peace. You will live…and live…and live. It will never stop. Here, I can dig up a thousand new ways to break you. And then put you back together, and break you all over again.”
She leaned in close, inches from Alvar’s face, her eyes as dark as ink. She was like a wraith of Liuridar floating over him, ready to consume his soul.