by A. C. Cobble
Mutely, she nodded and struggled to her feet.
“What was that?” he asked, a finger touching his scalp gingerly where the skin had been torn open.
She could only shake her head, frightened that King Edward had called upon a creature she’d never heard of, disturbed at how quickly she’d retreated and then fallen. If Duke hadn’t been there…
“Thanks for distracting it,” he said earnestly, looking down at his broadsword as if he meant to wipe blood from it, but the blade was as bare as when he’d drawn it. He glanced at the fallen creature and shuddered.
“Next time, you distract it, and I’ll sneak up from behind,” she rasped.
They started walking again, both of them looking nervously at the crater the beast had emerged from. It was a large pocket of earth and brick. There was nothing to show how it had gotten there.
“This entire tunnel could be lined with… with things like that,” she warned.
Duke nodded grimly.
“We can’t survive this,” she realized.
“I’ve got an idea,” claimed Duke. “We’ve got to… we’ve got to make it a little farther.”
Mindless, shambling possessed emerged from darkened corridors, raising numb fingers grasping for throats. Ephemeral shades appeared from within the shadows, clutching at limbs, trying to snare her and Duke’s arms where they couldn’t swing their blessed weapons. Monsters, indescribable, burst from walls, and in one terrifying case, the ceiling. Wolfmalkin and grimalkin, their senses fortunately blunted by the confusing underground passages, waited for them around half-a-dozen corners.
Oliver was limping from an injured leg, and he constantly used his off hand to wipe blood from his eyes. Claws had raked Sam’s back, tearing her vest, her shirt, and her skin. She could feel the parallel lines of where three talons had parted her flesh as easily as knife would cut paper. Blood leaked down the small of her back, gluing her shirt to her body. The healing potion she’d quaffed had merely slowed the flow to a trickle and reduced a myriad of bumps and bruises to a dull ache that seemed to cover her entire body. Her throat ached with every breath where several hands had tried to close around her neck. She and Duke were battered, dragging, and she’d become certain they wouldn’t make it out of the nightmare tunnels when he paused in front of her.
“What?” she croaked, rubbing at her throat.
“I don’t want to say anything in case he can hear,” muttered Duke, a hand against the wall, his head bobbing from exhaustion and pain.
She waited, air wheezing in and out of her open mouth.
He pointed to the wall, and when she looked closer, she could see the brick was molded around a black metal sheet that rose from floor to ceiling.
“Can you… can you use your supernatural strength?” he questioned.
She nodded, unsure what he was asking.
From his seed, she’d gained power, incredible strength and speed. She’d infused that power into her tattoos, hiding them from the spirits and extending that protection to Duke as well. The shades had difficulty detecting them, and it may have been what prevented the king from simply possessing them, but their enemies were thick in the tunnels, and there was no way around. The increased strength and speed she had was churning at a low burn, but it gave little advantage when their opponents were the size of a carriage and as dense as a block of stone.
She shuddered at the thought, recalling one slavering monster they’d given up trying to fight and had simply ran. The thing was out there, somewhere behind them.
Duke tapped the metal sheet, drawing her out of her exhausted reverie. She saw bolts in the metal, sealing it shut. He mimicked opening it, and below their feet, she felt a thrum, the rumble of the rail.
Her eyes opened in surprise, and he nodded to confirm her guess.
Hells. An exhaust tube for the rail lines. It meant the locomotives and their cars would be passing directly beneath their feet. This tube was carrying the filthy air from the mechanical engines up to the surface. If they could…
She closed her eyes, whispering utterances in a language long forgotten in Enhover. She sheathed her kris daggers and pinched her wrists at the terminal points of Kalbeth’s ink. She didn’t call upon the full power of the spirits, did not bring the shades through the shroud and into the patterns injected into her skin, but she borrowed some.
Putting her fingers against the metal, trying to wedge the tips of the digits beneath the sheet of steel, she felt cold power coursing through her veins. The seed of kings amplified what she was already capable of. She could do this. Grunting, she wiggled her fingers deeper, pressing into the metal, forcing it apart, and then she peeled it like the skin of a fruit.
A horrible screech echoed down the hall, but there was nothing they could do about that. Wolfmalkin and grimalkin would hear the noise but hopefully not be able to follow it to the source in the confusing maze of tunnels. The shades may not have heard it at all.
She ripped the panel the rest of the way open and found a tube roughly twice the width of her shoulders. It was entirely black and smelled foul from the noxious fumes that boiled up from below. Looking down it, she couldn’t see a bottom.
“Should we go back and try to find rope… somewhere?” whispered Duke.
She shook her head then held her hands and legs wide, showing him what she intended.
Wide-eyed, he looked back at her but did not argue. Both of them knew they couldn’t continue in the tunnels. They’d been lucky so far, sustaining painful but not crippling injuries. Every sweep of the claw, clutch of a shade, or spinning brick dislodged from the wall could be the last. They had to escape, and buried beneath Southundon, surrounded by denizens of the underworld, there was nowhere else to go.
Leaning into the tube, she placed her hands on opposite sides of the metal cylinder. It was unpleasantly hot but not scalding. She inhaled cautiously and found she could barely breathe the foul air. She coughed it out, withdrew her head to gasp a lungful of cleaner air, and then stepped into the tube, quickly placing her boots on opposite walls, pressing out with her hands, holding herself up with the pressure.
She slipped, unable to find good purchase on the soot-covered metal, but the pressure from her arms and legs slowed her descent, and painstakingly, she slid down, the poisonous air closing around her, the light vanishing as in fits and jerks, she dropped into the earth.
Above her, the little light was snuffed out entirely out as Duke leaned in, cursing and attempting his own descent. Larger than her, he had less room to spread his limbs to get leverage against the walls. He was also twice her weight, and she could hear him slipping and sliding above her.
“Hells,” she muttered.
She released some of the tension in her arms, letting her legs control what was quickly becoming a fall. They should have let him go first, but it was too late now. She wasn’t climbing back up.
Grime and filth covered her, soot billowing in clouds as her feet scraped it from the metal walls. She held her breath and closed her eyes, knowing that stuff could kill her as easily as a blade, and she tried to move faster without dropping into a free fall.
Above her, Duke sounded like bone being dragged from a grave as his body slid down the metal tube. More soot cascaded down on top of her head from where he was knocking it loose, and her lungs began to burn from holding her breath. He snorted, but she didn’t hear him take in more air. Like her, he was holding his breath. Like her, he wouldn’t be able to do it much longer.
She looked down between her feet, blinking to keep her eyes from clogging with the black dust all around her. She couldn’t see a damned thing.
If they were above a rail tunnel, she wasn’t sure where it was. She wasn’t sure in the pitch black how she would know when she reached the end of the tube. Would she simply drop down onto the tracks? Was there a platform, or… Sprits forsake it, they couldn’t just drop onto the tracks. In the narrow rail tunnels, there would be nowhere to hide, nowhere to avoid the speeding mass of me
tal and combusted energy. She paused, unsure what to do.
Above her, Duke slipped and fell before arresting himself, one of his boots stomping painfully on the fingers of her left hand. She locked her knees with her back against the wall, reached up, and gripped his leg with her free hand. He shifted, and she moved her fingers.
He waited silently. She guessed that like her, his lungs were burning, his eyes watering or blind. He didn’t move, though, didn’t panic, yet.
Beneath her, she felt a tremble of motion in the tube and heard the deep rumble of an approaching locomotive.
She whispered, expending the last of her breath, “When I say go, you let go.”
“To where?” he asked before falling into a terrible coughing fit and losing his grip on the sides of the tube. He slid half a yard down, his knee bumping against her head before he stopped himself again.
“We’re going to land on top of a rail car, hopefully,” she hissed, She hacked out her own coughs, unable to keep the fouled air from her lungs. She gasped. “It’s the only way.”
Still coughing, he didn’t argue. She wasn’t sure if it was because he couldn’t get the breath to do it or because he didn’t have a better idea.
The rail, moving quickly through the tunnel between stops, roared below.
“Go!” she cried, and she let go.
The Cartographer XXV
He felt her fall away below him.
He tucked his arms in and let go with his legs. His chest ached, and his heart hammered from lack of air. His stomach lurched at the sudden fall. His shoulders and knees bounced against the metal of the tube. Then suddenly, he was free of it. His booted feet smacked into something hard and moving very fast.
He was thrown from his feet and landed on his stomach. Inch by inch, his body began to slide backward along the steel roof of a railcar. There were dim lights somewhere in the tunnel, but he was too disoriented to identify the source. For a moment, he was confused about what had just happened, but he knew the slow slide down the railcar was not good. At some point, he would slide off the end of the thing.
He splayed his fingers against the metal roof, trying to find purchase on the smooth surface. Wind blew against his face. Above his head, he heard a high-pitched whistle as the top of the tunnel whizzed by.
Slowly, he began to get his bearings, to see that the light was reflected off the dark walls of the tunnel. It looked to be coming from within the car. Three or four yards above his head was the solid stone ceiling of the rail tunnel.
Periodically, they rushed beneath tighter sections. He swallowed uncomfortably as he felt the roaring air compress when they passed a low-hanging protrusion. Had the timing been different, Sam and his bodies could have crashed into the stone at speed.
Sam.
He looked around, not seeing her in front of him, and then realized she’d dropped first. She’d be back—
“Duke!”
She wasn’t anywhere he could see in the dim light of the tunnel, so he began scooting backward, letting the wind shove him along the surface of the roof. He could vaguely spot the car behind them, but she was not there. He’d heard her, though, hadn’t he?
“Duke, I can’t hold! Hells, are you up there?”
He scurried across the roof and looked over the end of the railcar.
Sam was hanging there, between his car and the one behind, panic in her eyes, her fingers dug into the steel roof trying to hold herself up. As he watched, her hand slipped, and she began to fall.
He lunged forward and caught her wrists, his face half a yard from hers. Her mouth was open in a wordless scream, and he could see terror and relief battling in her eyes.
Over the sound of the rumbling wheels, he shouted, “I’ve got you.”
Then, the car jolted as they took a hard turn, and he slid forward, toppling over Sam’s head, both of them falling between the cars. He fell, bouncing off the front of the car behind them and then landing on a metal platform, his bones creaking at the jarring impact.
Sam crashed down on top of him, all knees and elbows.
For a moment, he expected to feel the steel wheels slice through his body, the weight of the car pressing the broad discs as effectively as a blade, but it never came. He realized they must have landed on the couplings between the cars. He shifted, trying to work his way out from under Sam, but he stopped. He was staring at the blurred steel lines of the rail just half a yard from his face. They were on the coupling, but his head was hanging off of it, dangling down between the cars.
He cursed and tried to arrange himself to a safer position, but Sam was lying on top of him. He couldn’t risk throwing her off.
Fortunately, in moments, the car began to slow. He called, “We’re approaching a station.”
“Which one?” gasped Sam, sounding dazed.
“Does it matter?” he asked.
As the car slowed, he wiggled out from under her. He jumped down onto the side of the track, dirty rocks shifting beneath his boots as he landed.
“I suppose not,” she admitted. She let him pull her down after him.
The car came to a final rocking stop, nudging him on the shoulder and nearly knocking him down. Ignoring it, he dragged Sam behind him, emerging from between the two cars and clambering onto the waist-high passenger platform. A handful of people, disembarking or boarding, stared at the two of them in shock.
“Annual inspection,” he mumbled, moving quickly through the sparse crowd as they parted before him. He looked at Sam and smirked. Her face was blackened by soot, her clothes filthy and torn. For better or worse, she was completely unrecognizable. He supposed he would be as well.
They climbed the stairwell that led to the street, his legs aching from where some creature had smashed him against the wall of the tunnel and later when he landed hard onto the rail car. His face stung from half-a-dozen cuts and scrapes. His hand left a sickening trail of soot and blood on the brass railing of the stairwell. When they emerged onto the street, he breathed a deep lungful of air, glad to see the night sky above him. The sky and the burned-out hulk of the Church’s library.
“Through there,” he said. “It will take us right to the palace.”
Nodding, fingers probing some injury on her shoulder, Sam followed him across the square. They ignored the startled looks from the few people sober enough to realize how out of place they were on the streets so late at night, and they entered the ruins of the Church.
They slinked through the burnt timbers and scattered piles of ash. He hoped they’d worked their way around the rest of his father’s traps, but he wasn’t sure how the old man had known they would be passing through the Filthy Beggar in the first place. Had the shades been summoned there in preparation, or had they been sent there after he and Sam were detected? Would King Edward be aware they’d changed routes by going into the rail line? Could he reposition his forces?
As they worked their way through the ruined hulk of the Church’s library, Oliver decided it didn’t matter. It was too late to turn away. Now that his father knew they were in the city, it would be just as difficult to flee as it would be to move forward. They were committed, and the only way to finish was to keep going.
The doorway to the palace proper was unguarded but locked. Thick bands of iron bound it shut, along with a massive lock the size of Oliver’s fist.
“Think you could use your super strength again to crush that lock?” Oliver asked Sam.
“Not without making a ruckus your father will hear all the way up in his tower,” she whispered back.
A man cleared his throat behind them, and they spun.
Duke John Wellesley was standing in the middle of the burned down Church, barely visible in the shifting moonlight that bled between the clouds in the sky and the charred spars of the Church’s buttresses.
“John,” gasped Oliver.
His brother nodded, slapping his palm with a bit of metal.
A key, Oliver realized. The key to the lock behind them, he guessed.
“You are going to kill Father, aren’t you?” accused his brother.
Oliver shook his head, grim-faced. “I have to. John, Northundon…”
“Philip told me everything,” said John, “everything you told him, at least.”
“You know, then,” said Oliver. He watched his brother, but John made no move except fiddling with the key. “We cannot allow this to continue, John. Tens of thousands died in Northundon. Tonight, we saw hundreds sacrificed just to slow our approach. Hundreds of innocents, John! These are our people! He’s killing them like they’re no more than animals, their only purpose to support his awful power.”
“You’ve turned your back on us then, the Crown, your family?” demanded John.
“If the Crown has no care for the people, then yes,” said Oliver. “If our family has no loyalty to the nation, if we exist only to feast on the fruits of others, then yes. I cannot live that life any longer, John.”
His older brother looked away.
“I’ve seen what terrible price our colonies pay,” continued Oliver. “I’ve seen the blood that is shed to fuel our engines of conquest. You have, too. Here, in this building, you saw the reaver. You saw the bodies that it had stripped of flesh. Father is the one who released that thing, all to convince me to stay in Enhover! He let loose two dozen more of them, John. We trapped them inside the druid keep across the river. If we hadn’t… You were here. You saw what that thing was.”
John grimaced.
“Philip has only seen one side of the old man,” insisted Oliver. “You’ve seen the other with your own eyes. You’ve seen the price that our people are expected to pay for our greed. Can you live with it, John?”
“I don’t know any other way,” admitted his older brother. John drew a deep breath and exhaled, his gaze rolling around the ruins of the library, the look on his face showing he was remembering that night, remembering the terrors he’d witnessed. He turned back to Oliver. “If you’re successful, what will you do? Will you take the crown for yourself and become a different type of dictator? Will you come for us next?”
