Chapter 24 #3
“When it comes to this Artifice, you are a little boy playing with toys you don’t understand.
But I’ve also been studying them. I understand their purpose, because like the Fae, I, too, specialize in anguish.
You will never fathom the things being done to you.
You will only know suffering, and that you could have changed it all at this very moment, the one crossroad in your life when you could have made a different choice. ”
Alvar stared into her eyes, a fawn frozen before a wolf.
But slowly, unsteadily, he got to his feet, hunching over as he began to descend.
Jesamin met my gaze, nodded, and moved after him, one hand on her pistol.
“Uncle Wroth?” Marrion stood at my shoulder, looking as pale as a ghost.
“Yes?”
She arched one dark eyebrow. “Your paramour is one hell of a scary woman when she wants to be.”
I sighed wistfully. “Isn’t she wonderful?”
Jesamin and Alvar led us to the bottom of the staircase. We descended endlessly, ignoring the darkened labs on either side of us, the entire group pausing and grouping defensively when the fulmen surged and ebbed.
“How did he know we were here?” she asked Alvar under her breath, waiting out a surge.
In the next flash of light, the sneer on Alvar’s face was entirely visible. “You used Fae Artifice, didn’t you? It screamed the alarm. We all heard it.”
Jesamin stared at him evenly, her gaze flicking to Líadan only once. “Ah.”
Yes, I had believed all of Liuridar had heard the alarm when Líadan was released. I just hadn’t thought an actual Fae would be alive to hear it.
The surge died out, and we continued down to a wide landing, a dead end where a single door awaited us.
“This is where we came through,” she said, keeping her voice as she peered through the chthonium door. “It leads to a crematorium and the Fae’s personal quarters. Beyond that, Alvar will have to guide us.”
I nodded, holding up an arm to prevent her from going any further. If there was a true Fae down here—no, because there was, I believed Jesamin without reservation—she would put herself on the front lines over my dead body.
But it was a difficult thing to fathom. I found a strange space in my mind, where I could both accept Jesamin’s word as indisputable truth, and yet be unable to countenance it as fact.
We had believed Liliach Daromir had slaughtered the last of our creators. Had they truly been sleeping beneath us this entire time, waiting for something, or someone, to awaken them?
I had to believe it now. No vampires had gone past the Gates since that first tragic exploration by the highbloods; there was no reason my people would ever have discovered the sleepers in the abyss.
And yet it remained unfathomable…and uncomfortable.
Liuridar was not the only Fae city in all of the Below.
There could be still more Fae, more human chattel, suspended in those chrysalises beneath the Moor…
the Rift…the Vale. Even under Foria, well below the deep tunnels where Thurn Hakkon had once raised his cult of wolves.
And not only the Fae themselves, but their cities of pure Artifice. Their destructive, indestructible biomachina.
The thought occurred to get them out now. I had Alvar in hand. I could simply leave those unfortunates from Lonmire behind. Return with black powder and my brothers, and cleanse this place with fire and blood down to its very bones.
But it wasn’t only the knowledge that Jesamin would never look at me again with anything but disgust that held me back. It was knowing how fucking gods-damned awful it would be to die alone down here, hoping against hope for a rescue that would never come.
And the living Fae needed to die by my hand. If I didn’t watch him take his last breath myself, I would never sleep again.
After I killed the Fae, I would get them out. And then I would find a way to destroy the city that didn’t involve collapsing the entirety of my hold into a massive sinkhole.
I stepped into the hall. The fulmen sparked overhead, illuminating its empty interior. I sniffed, picking up a whiff of Jesamin’s scent still lingering in the air: fear and anger.
“Keep going,” she muttered, slipping through the door behind me.
In unspoken accord, we surrounded Alvar; Jesamin and I led the pack, Alvar behind us, followed by Marrion, Líadan, Talos, and Nikos. If he wanted to escape, he would have a hell of a time fighting through.
She pointed the way over my shoulder, and I pushed through tight corridors, picking up the scent of old ash and bone.
“The crematorium,” she said, so low it wasn’t even a whisper. “Straight through to his chambers.”
Oh, I could smell him already.
His scent burned my nose, sending sharp pains through my skull. It was both pungent and sharp, underlaid with acrid sweat, and the nauseatingly sweet reek that had seeped from Kajarin’s pores as she lay dying of pox.
Hoping that this Fae was also dying was too much to ask for.
The room beyond took me aback, even without the Fae present. Furniture from the Rivers, brought down to the darkest depths of the Below, now carried that sinus-blistering stench. I cast Alvar a disbelieving glance over my shoulder.
“He demanded the comforts of his station. We brought him my camp set,” he muttered, and Jesamin jabbed him with an elbow as she saw him sidle towards a piece of Artifice left in pieces on the floor.
He moved away—and stumbled, nearly crashing into the wall. Everyone reached out, gripping walls or furniture for stability, as the floor rocked beneath our feet.
“The crystcore,” Marrion gasped, swallowing so hard I heard her throat click. “Gods, its close.”
Jesamin was bent nearly in half, clutching her stomach. The room shuddered, the stone around us groaning, and I was suddenly, horribly aware that the weight of the world was quite literally resting on the ceiling above us.
Would the chthonium city hold it up? Perhaps, but the Fae metal seemed interwoven into the rock of our world, rather than supporting it, and there was still plenty of natural stone available to crush human or bloodwitch skulls if it were dislodged.
More sounds echoed, like a whale song in varied, groaning tones. Jesamin looked at me, her face stark white, and bit hard on her lower lip. “That’s the Below settling. He’s…he must be preparing to move the city.”
“We move quickly then, and get out as fast as possible.”
“Where are they kept?” Jesamin whispered to Alvar, who was praying under his breath.
He pointed. Hidden in shadows, beside a floor-length mirror, of all things, was a slim chthonium door. “Three fingers will open it.”
Jesamin gave Alvar a narrow-eyed glance. “If there’s defensive Artifice, tell me now, or Wroth will have the pleasure of interring you in a preservation cylinder next to my dead body.”
Alvar shook his head forcefully. “No, none.”
Before I could pull her back from the door, Jesamin ran three fingers over it, and the door slid upwards into its hidden pocket, revealing the interior.
No, revealing hell.
Human faces, pallid and hollow-eyed, utterly hopeless. We were all frozen, taking in the limp bodies covered in dark bruises, the curled limbs, the surgically-fine cuts. The dark stains on the floor and walls. The ungodly stench.
The moment the door opened, they all turned their faces away, as though hoping not to be seen. Hoping not to be selected by the Fae who had made himself their master.
A woman whimpered, and another hissed at her for silence.
It was a man who dared to look back at us, and realized what he was seeing. He stared at me with bruised eyes, like burned-out black holes over his bloody nose and mouth.
“Lord Wroth.” It was a hopeless supplication, disbelieving, but he repeated it with dawning, terrified hope.
Until I met Jesamin, I had never, ever heard my name spoken in such a voice.
And I made my plans as soon as I heard it, for these people could not be allowed to spend another moment waiting in this darkness.
“Nikos.” I gestured, and Jesamin helped. The man inside stumbled to his feet, cajoling the other prisoners, and we picked up limp bodies, bringing them into the light of the fulmen.
It was terrible. Moving in near-silence, but for the pained moans of the most injured victims, we brought them out. Marrion gave them small sips of water, sacrificing the last of the waterskins. Jesamin pulled a velvet drape from the wall, slicing it into long strips to use as makeshift bandages.
Alvar did nothing, but I didn’t expect him to. I loomed over him. “Where do the stairs lead?”
He licked his cracked lips. “Up. Above.”
“You might wish to make yourself more clear,” I told him. “I have no compunction about locking you in that room and leaving you to die. How did you bring down the people of Lonmire?”
Alvar’s red-rimmed eyes overflowed with hate as he glared at me.
“The stairs go above,” he repeated, the tendons in his throat standing out with strain.
“All the way up. No branches, no tunnels. The Master told me to go up, and I opened the door and had the men dig out the barrier. It’s a straight shot to freedom.
That’s how I brought him up, and them down. ”
That explained the grandiosity and size of the staircase.
It was nothing but an ancient main thoroughfare for the Fae themselves, easy access to the beings living in the world above before their doors were sealed away beneath faerie mounds.
Now that I thought on it, of course the so-called superior species would not have wanted the bother of traversing the liminal paths they’d created.
But it made the end of this mission so much simpler, and although I’d never thank the Fae for that, I’d make damn good use of it.
I nodded to Nikos. “You are to get them out immediately. I want you to take this stairway back up, straight to the surface. Do not linger for any reason.”
Nikos saluted with a fist to his chest.