Chapter 26 #2
“You are sure?” My eyes were glued to the bottle. She would burn with strength like a wildfire, but the moment that power fled her veins, she’d pay a toll for it.
She looked at me, her mother’s green eyes glinting in her father’s face.
“We have no choice, Uncle. If we make the run, some of us may die, but there’s still a chance.
If we keep moving at this pace and the miasma comes…
there is no chance at all. We all die, one way or another.
Furthermore, I’d like to tell my parents I love them, and that marriage to the future high king of Foria sounds quite plebeian now and I certainly will not be committing myself to such nonsense. ”
“Well…if you’re going to put it that way.” I held out a hand, offering a finger for her to prick. Marrion immediately whipped out her blood-letting blade, carving a shallow gash. “Demyan will never know what he missed.”
Now she smiled, tucking the knife away. “Several drops each. They’ll need the healing effects.” She uncorked the bottle of dark ooze, and drank it, her eyes squeezed shut. I imagined that it must taste unholy, particularly when she doubled over and wheezed.
I went to the group of ailing humans, squeezing my fingertip as a drop of blood beaded. The woman who had been horrified at the concept looked up at me, her eyes hollow, but she had heard it all, and I saw the understanding in her eyes.
“What is your name?” I asked gently.
“Dareia,” she whispered. “Please.”
She opened her mouth, and I squeezed several drops onto her tongue. “None of you will be bound to me. My blood will keep you alive, and pass through you, leaving nothing of myself behind. You will not be harmed by this.”
The next man recoiled as I extended my hand, but Dareia slapped his arm sharply. “Just take it, Stefanos.”
Eventually I had given blood to all those who were still whole and hale enough to run on Marrion’s strings.
As I prowled on all fours, Nikos gently laid several of the injured on my back, lashing them between the bone spurs with thin ropes.
He gently hupped the two humans left over onto his shoulders, shifting his weight as he prepared to run up the stairs.
Rasmus had made a sling, and had a woman clinging to his back like a tired toddler. He looked back at his brother, who, blocked from escaping either up or down, was staring sourly at all of us.
“You’re coming with us,” he said to Alvar, his voice harsh. “We’re both answering for what we did.”
Alvar’s eyes flicked to me, clearly weighing his chances.
A shuddering gasp drew everyone’s attention.
Marrion straightened up, one hand pressed to her stomach. Dark flames flickered in her eyes, her incisors longer and sharper than they had been a moment ago. Even the planes of her face were harder, the angles as sharp as glass. “Oh, he most certainly is.”
She brought her hand to her mouth, shredding through her own flesh with delicate ease. Blood burst forth, forming those delicate, wavering tendrils that spilled from her open hand like a dark anemone.
One of them shot towards Alvar, burying itself in his throat with a tiny, sickening pop. The man clawed at himself, shuddering, but his hands slowly fell away. He went to stand obediently before her.
The humans stared with wide, revolted eyes, but the woman who had bullied them into taking the blood tipped up her chin, awaiting the tendril that would move her body for her even when her conscious mind collapsed. “Do it,” Dareia said roughly. “They’re waiting for me, I know they are.”
Marrion smiled, the tendrils wriggling towards them and gently insinuating themselves beneath flesh, binding to their bloodstreams. They lined up, standing shoulder to shoulder.
“Now run,” she whispered, one hand held aloft to control her puppet theater.
They moved as one, and all I could think of was the sled dogs of Nordrin; all heads bowed forward at once, arms and legs pumping in unison, and then Marrion was running after them, coasting on that mixture of distilled fiendish blood.
Nikos and Rasmus went after her, the alchemist gritting his teeth and sweating, and I brought the rear, nudging them when one or the other stumbled or faltered. It became necessary to re-open the cut on my finger, giving them each my blood to help them carry on.
The journey took eons. When the stairway moved through thin air, trailing through the massive cavern that housed Liuridar, I hardly looked at the city sparkling like a dead star below us. I had eyes only for Marrion and her automaton team, the ailing Rasmus, and Nikos’s pale, strained face.
There was no miasma. Yet. But at any moment, the entire cavern system could flood with it, and I would hardly have time to think of Jesamin before I died.
So we kept going. Up into the darkness, into the natural caverns, the liminal spaces, with no idea of where we would come out.
None of what we passed was familiar. I had never seen this stair in my entire life, not even in the years I spent Below. It connected to nothing, a neverending path that seemed to take a thousand years to traverse.
Until it ended.
The humans were running up, up—and suddenly stopped. Marrion drew back, hissing under her breath, as her light landed on the end of the tunnel.
A door. A massive, circular door, black witchwood planks banded by chthonium.
Rasmus fell to his knees, gasping, and Nikos leaned on the wall. Neither of them looked good. And soon the air itself might be toxic to breathe.
“You used this path.” I spoke to Alvar, throat rasping with pain and thirst. “Open it.”
He sneered, but Marrion turned her flickering gaze on him, the blood-tendril squirming under the pale skin of his throat, and he held his hand to the door.
He traced sigils upon it, drawing them with jerky motions, inscribing with his fingertip the sinuous Fae language. The door shuddered beneath his touch; a groan echoed down the stairs, followed by the whisper of the door’s internal mechanisms unlocking.
Laboring under Marrion’s strings, he pushed the doors open.
A breath of cool, fresh air rushed over us, and Marrion guided her puppets out, their feet sinking into dew-glazed grass under a vast canopy of stars. They were all trembling, disbelieving.
She cut the strings, all but the one in Alvar, so abruptly that all her puppets collapsed at once. Cries of pain burst from them; hands massaged the balled-up knots in calves and thighs, and one man began convulsing, his body driven to its very limits.
Marrion fell to her knees in the grass beside him, resting her hand on his chest. Tears sparkled on her cheeks. “He’s close to the end,” she whispered. “He won’t make it without a healer.”
Nikos and Rasmus laid their burdens down, arranging their limp limbs, and my knight came to untie the ropes and bring down the humans I’d carried.
Afterwards I straightened, peering into the night. We needed healers, bloodwitches, transportation; none of these humans, used as livestock and driven hard for their very lives, would make it another ten steps on their own.
I didn’t know where we were. The doors opened on a broad field, wildflowers waving in dark patches with the breeze; a river roiled almost fifty yards away.
I breathed in, tasting the scent of it, the minerals in the water; we had emerged near the northern bank of the River Nicla.
Turning slowly, I took in the sight of the door: set in a rough patch of earth that had been scooped away with shovels and hands. It had been unearthed in the middle of a faerie mound, the earth itself carved away to reveal it.
It explained why no one had ever found this stair, nor the door itself. The scent of the earth was relatively fresh; Alvar’s diggers had served their purpose, and been left to rot Below.
“We’re on the River Nicla,” I told Marrion. “I will follow it north to Owlhorn and bring aid.”
She wasn’t looking at me, or listening at all. Her eyes were fixed on the sky, heartened and hopeful, and I looked up.
Something dark blotted out the stars, circling, descending.
A fiend collided with the earth before me, lips drawing back over a mouth full of needle fangs, his chiropteran face distorted with fury and relief.
“Brother, what the hell were you thinking?” Bane snarled.