Chapter 24 #4
I looked at him hard. “Do not stop to eat or sleep. Keep going no matter what happens. All that matters, your last order from me, is to get them to Owlhorn as fast as you can. Once there, tell Bram that the waves have crested and seal the castle gates until I, or one of my brothers, comes to relieve you of duty.”
Bram would understand the code phrase. He would immediately scry for my brothers’ sanguimancers in a Red Mirror and inform them that I was either dead or dying, and that the Below was to be treated as an actively hostile and imminent threat.
These orders would supersede Silvain’s, and no one would send a rescue; all focus would be on containment.
If I survived the encounter with the Fae, I would return to my brothers to deliver my assessment, and plan for the immediate destruction of this city.
But first, these people needed a reason to live.
“My lord.” This time, there was no question, no argument. Nikos simply set to rounding up the healthiest of the prisoners to carry the injured, and he allowed Rasmus and Jesamin to fashion a sling from strips of the velvet curtain and bind a woman with a broken leg to his back.
Jesamin was next, but she raised her chin and shook her head ever so slightly.
“Rasmus, you will go with him.” I looked the alchemist dead in the eye, hoping he would understand and take this opportunity with both hands.
And he did. “I will do everything in my power to see it done, my lord,” he said hoarsely, slinging a man’s arm over his shoulder.
Jesamin put a hand on his free shoulder, squeezing lightly. “Rasmus,” she whispered. “Lady smile on you all. Good luck.”
Acid burned in my stomach as she kissed his cheek, but I swallowed it down. If the boy needed something to see him through on his task, so be it.
“Marrion.” I studied my niece, the ashen pallor of her skin. “You’ve made us proud, now do this last thing for me. Go with them and see them home safely, then fetch your father and make plans. I want Liuridar wiped from this earth. Whether we come back or not, do what you must do.”
She was too far gone to put up a fight. Marrion nodded, kissed my cheek, then gripped Jesamin’s hand and rested her forehead against hers. When she released the Artificer, her eyes were bright, but she no longer had enough liquid left within her to spare on tears.
“Good luck,” she said, her voice rough. “I will see you again. All of you.”
One by one, they trooped back the way we had come, leaving me, Jesamin, Líadan, and Talos surrounding Alvar. Jesamin met Líadan’s eyes, motioning after them, but the uncanny human stood her ground, refusing to move.
“Let me go with him,” Alvar said hoarsely. “He’s my brother.”
“And?” Jesamin gave him a cool glance.
“I need to protect him. You’re sending him out there with a walking banquet.”
She shook her head. “Some would say if you really wanted to protect him, you never would’ve brought him in on your little schemes.”
“I know it’s too late for me,” he said, tears gleaming in his pale blue eyes.
The shine made them look like pale marbles.
He sucked in a breath, and the tears spilled free, carving tracks through the dirt on his face.
“But it’s not too late for him. If I’m to be sacrificed…
let it be for something meaningful. If something comes, I can shield them. ”
“Oh?” Jesamin asked lightly. “Could you, now?”
“I can’t explain it.” Alvar wiped his face, eyes fluttering. “But I must help guide them. All I wanted…was to do what was best for my family. And now the best I can do is see that he makes it back home. I know it isn’t much…but it’s all I’m worth now.”
There was a long, incredulous silence.
Jesamin flicked her eyes skyward. “Are you done? Did you get it all out?”
The venom in Alvar’s gaze was almost shocking; from tear-glazed sorrow to pure loathing. I gripped his face, turning him towards me.
“If you ever look at my woman with that expression again, I will pluck your eyes right out of your fucking skull and eat them,” I said softly. “You’re coming with us, Alvar.”
He sneered despite the tremor that ran through him, and I released him, jaw intact, teeth uncrushed. He would be punished later, and sorely. I needed every iota of strength in my body for what was to come.
“Take us to this Fae,” I told him.
Alvar looked around the room, his eyes going strangely blank, and pushed past the prisoner’s room, past the mirror, to a tall door hidden behind one of the out-of-place draperies.
“This goes to the engineering segment,” he said.
“There is a room beyond, where the selaroc is held, that was buried by a cave-in.”
He raised a trembling hand to push the door, and despite my anger towards him, I recognized the genuine fear in him. The Fae had broken him, whether he knew it yet or not.
“Open it.”
Jesamin shifted her stance subtly, pistol at her side. Líadan posed no threat, her arms wrapped around herself once more, but Talos had quietly insinuated himself between Alvar and the crematorium.
The only way for him to move was forward.
Alvar’s lip trembled and curled. “Fine. Fuck you. I hope you all die.”
He pushed the door open, and I shoved him into a long hall of smooth chthonium walls. Several crystalline doors were shut, and the hall abruptly terminated in a sharp lefthand turn. The floor was covered in dust and fine rubble, and large chunks of rock spilled from many of the open rooms.
Looking up, we all pondered the massive gash in the chthonium ceiling that had allowed the rockfall.
Had a Fae done it deliberately, over two thousand years ago?
Had one chosen to hide the crystcore, either to bury it for good, or to return to it later?
Perhaps they had anticipated their slaves and creations attempting to steal what they considered to be theirs, and theirs alone.
It was yet another question we’d never answer. If Marrion, or even Wyn, attempted to return to use the Eye, I would physically bind them and keep them prisoner in my castle.
The hall was mostly quiet, but for the occasional scrape and thud that echoed to us.
“What is behind the closed doors?” I asked Alvar under my breath.
He shook his head, mouth pinched. “His larder. Nothing you want to see, and there is no one living left in them.”
Jesamin slipped past me, pistol at the ready, and crept in a silent stance to the end of the hall. She peered around the corner, waving us forward.
I had nearly reached her when the hall rumbled all around us: floor, ceiling, walls shaking at once, the fulmen igniting in spastic spurts.
The exposed stone overhead groaned ominously, raining dust and pebbles.
This time even my guts churned, sensing a fraction of what Jesamin and Marrion must feel.
I pushed her back, and peered into the darkness.
The room beyond was a perfect circle formed of biomachina, the core of occult energy that kept the city above alive, and right in the center, I saw him.
The Fae.
He was designed to be a human’s worst nightmare, all stretched limbs and stretched proportions and a wide mouth full of uncanny flat teeth.
He lay reclined with an open chthonium pod hanging from the ceiling, each hand, spidery and large enough to grip a human head like an orange, resting on a quartz sphere set within the arm rests.
The flickers of fulmen, as bright as lightning, played over his ghastly face.
Beyond him was a strange sort of console, a ledge of chthonium protruding from the wall, with a window of black glass set above it. A filthy, starved human stood at the console, staring at the window, his hands shoved deep into two holes in the chthonium.
The Fae’s eyes were closed, lids quivering as he focused on whatever the fuck he was doing.
His shoulders heaved, and he ripped his hands away from the orbs, doubled over.
The human at the console gasped, yanked his hands from the holes, and collapsed, babbling apologies to the Fae on his hands and knees.
This thing had to die. Every fiber of my being insisted that he should not exist.
I stalked past Jesamin, picking up speed as I moved towards the Fae.
The bastard who had killed my woman’s people.
Who treated those above as livestock. Fury suffused me until I saw everything with a faint sheen of red.
The blood remaining in my veins crept and crawled, began to race, and the primal rage of a fiend pushed me aside, taking over.
The Fae’s head snapped up. His eyes, black like pits in his skull with tiny pale pinpricks gleaming in their very core, focused on me, and a series of strange expressions crossed that warped face.
Confusion. Disbelief. Wonder.
And finally, realization.
My bones ached and screamed, stretching until they erupted.
Sharp bone spurs emerged from my spine and shoulders, blood spilling over my coat as the wounds resealed themselves around my armor.
Heat kindled in my throat, rising to an inferno until I felt I could roar out the ashes of my own charred interior.
I dropped to all fours, charging.
The Fae flung himself from the pod, moving in stuttering flashes—he picked up the human by the neck, and flung him at me.
I batted the man aside, hearing the sickening wet crunch of bones meeting metal, but not really hearing them at all. There were screams, but I knew not whose throats they came from.
The Fae raced toward me on all fours, limbs splayed—like a spider, his jittering movements so fast and eerie it was repulsive. I slammed into him, digging my claws into his guts.
He gasped something at me, mouth dropping wide open as he shrieked in my face to reveal multiple rows of those thin, flat teeth.
There was a sound behind me; a deafening crack, and the Fae jerked in my grasp. A round hole in his shoulder leaked black blood; he clapped a hand to it, and I felt the distant echoes of pain, and knew he had been clawing at me. That was my blood on his hands, red as roses.
I heard human shouts as well, and the Fae looked over my shoulder, his eyes widening.
He spoke in their liquid language, wheezing blood over his lips with every word. And then he said, in multiple clear voices speaking as one, “Alvar.”
I slammed him into the floor, almost disappointed in this prey. How had this soft thing ever been a master in any realm, a herder of slaves, a breaker of men?
I gripped his ribs, intending to tear him open, to spread his innards far and wide, but the Fae twisted, digging his hands into my flesh. I felt him moving under my skin, fingertips to my naked muscles.
The world was chaos around us, and all was focused on this pain. I heard Talos’s frustrated whirring, and then Jesamin’s shouting—which transmuted into a furious scream.
Alvar rushed past us, his hands dug into Jesamin’s hair, her unloaded pistol dropping to the floor. “Here! Take her! Master, take her!”
He heaved her at the wall and she bounced off, recoiling with a gasp to throw a wild punch at him.
She missed, and Alvar leaped past her as Talos managed to maneuver his overly-wide body into the room. He ducked beneath the golem’s bladed arm to sprint past Líadan and up the corridor.
“Fuck,” Jesamin spat, and she crawled to the pistol, digging in her pockets for more powder and shot.
The Fae hissed something, his voice like sharpened fingernails digging into my eardrums, but he wasn’t trying to kill me. He was trying to…to hold me, merging himself into my flesh.
I reared back, trying to rip myself away from him, but he was digging in, fingers wriggling beneath my skin over the blood-slick bone of my shoulderblades. The rational side of my mind was returning, acknowledging the pain.
I plunged deeper into the fiend rage, determined to end him.
“Gods damn you!” Jesamin cocked her pistol, aiming at the Fae. She pulled the trigger and another crack of thunder heralded the appearance of a hole in his thigh. The Fae’s leg went limp.
I heaved him up and smashed him down, his fingers losing their grip on my interior.
Again, and again, until the Fae’s hands slipped from my skin, gloved in red, and he went limp in my grasp.
Dead, finally. I released him, trying to stand and failing as I crept from the corpse. He had cut me, opened slits in my skin, and my body was so empty of blood I couldn’t think clearly.
Jesamin limped over to me, gasping for breath. “Gods, Wroth…” Her hands hovered over me, unsure of where to touch, and only then did I realize how bad it must be.
The fulmen flickered and went out. The only light was that of the crystcore, blocked by the smoky black window.
And two pinpricks of silver, staring up at us from the floor.
There was a wild motion in the dark, and then Jesamin’s desperate gasp and a cut-off shriek from Líadan.
I didn’t see her, but I felt her shoved away. He had dared to lay hands on her.
The rage returned with a vengeance.
Then the Fae’s fingers dug into me with desperate, dying vigor, and I gripped his ribcage, ripping up and out. Laying him open like a piece of meat in a butcher’s case. Disassembling, slipping his gears, breaking his joints.
Somewhere under the haze of red, my rational mind thought of Jesamin. If she were to take apart machina, unscrew the screws, unthread the gears, remove piece from piece, break it down to its core components, then that was what I did to the thing.
I erased it from the world entirely. Thirsting, desperate, pushed to the limit, my mind went with it.