“Last bit of warmth before the deeps,” Ibb said. “Take this chance to get your coats on. Stay close. I want to ask some questions.”
Harrow walked behind Yora as they picked their way through the crowd. People turned to stare as they passed, and Harrow glared at anyone who got too near. Most of the people clustered by the bonfire seemed to be beggars in truth, skinny, ragged men and women, dressed in scraps, with a few children drawn in close. Their skin was a uniform gray with dust and grime, and filthy hair hung in sticky clumps. Nearly all were maimed somehow—missing arms and legs, hands and feet, gaping eye sockets that made Gyre’s own scar itch, big patches of scabby, diseased flesh.
Besides the crippled and the diseased, though, there were the changed. A woman curled in the fetal position on a scrap of blanket, her legs trailing off into a dozen slim black tentacles, dripping a clear fluid. A young boy was missing most of his lower jaw, and his grotesquely elongated tongue twisted and curled underneath it, agile as a third hand. An emaciated man with the compound eyes of a fly, shrouded in translucent gauze.
Gyre hadn’t been aware he’d been staring until he felt a nudge in his ribs. Kit, standing close at his side, nodded quietly at a hairless woman whose skin glistened with mucus.
“You know what happened to them, don’t you?” she said under her breath.
“Dhaka,” Gyre said. “Ghoul magic. Either they fell in with a dhakim cult, or else they—”
“Went someplace they shouldn’t have gone, and messed with something they shouldn’t have.”
“Like the Tomb,” Gyre said flatly. “Is that what you mean?”
She gave a small shrug. “I just don’t want you to say I didn’t warn you. It’s not too late to renegotiate.”
Gyre shook his head and kept his eyes on the ground.
“Your business.” Kit shrugged. “Your friends are attracting some attention.”
“Everyone knows Yora. Even down here.”
“Your crew has quite a reputation.”
“It’s not that. At least not just that.” Gyre shrugged. “Yora’s father was Kaidan Hiddenedge.”
“He was a bandit, right?”
“That’s what the Republic would like you to think. But it doesn’t explain why they went to such lengths to destroy him.” Gyre gestured at the beggars. “If you ask these people, they’ll tell you he was a hero who fought for the freedom of the tunnelborn against the corruption of the dux. Yora’s spent her life living with that legacy.”
“That’s a hard road to follow.” Kit eyed him sidelong. “You respect her, don’t you?”
“She pushes back against the Republic and the Order. That’s more than I can say for almost anyone else.”
“But you still want to find the Tomb,” Kit said.
Gyre pressed his lips together and didn’t reply.
On the other side of the fire, Ibb had found what he was looking for. Two women, Gyre’s age and nearly identical, sat side by side, wearing slightly better garb than was typical. Ibb squatted opposite them, and Gyre saw a couple of coins change hands. Ibb gestured him over, and the pair looked at one another. One of them closed her eyes with a sigh, while the other spoke.
“That’s a bad road to be taking right now,” she said. “New gang moved in from down-tunnel, and they’re hungry. Got a flesh-twister boss, maybe. Couple of scav packs went down and didn’t come back.”
“How many?”
The woman shrugged. “Enough. If you’re looking for a score, you’d be better going to the Roaring Well to try your luck. I heard Rodrig Axebite broke open a new tunnel there, and there’s been some scuffles over it. Plenty of old loot and new loot lying about, I should think.”
“Thanks for the advice,” Ibb said. He glanced at Kit. “But we’ve got a client. Is there a path that’ll get us around this new gang?”
“’S possible.” The woman, pale-skinned and so thin her face seemed half a skull, gave a shiver and a nod at Ibb’s purse. “If you’ve got a map and another decithaler.”
“Halfmask?” Ibb said.
Gyre pulled the roll of copied maps out of his pack and handed them over, along with another coin. Ibb flipped through until he found the one he wanted, and both women bent over it. The silent twin pointed while the other kept up a running commentary, and Ibb took notes in pencil.
Kit, bored, had wandered away, and Gyre found Yora by his side, with Harrow standing protectively behind her. Yora had her arms crossed tight, gripping her elbows, and her face was uncharacteristically pained. Gyre shifted toward her.
“Something wrong?” he said.
“These people,” Yora said. Her voice was tight. “The Republic built gates over the tunnels to keep us underground, and we tunnelborn turned around and did the same thing to the people we’d rather not see. Half of them won’t make it through the winter.”
Probably not. Gyre looked over the crowd of beggars. And another lot of luckless wretches will move in to replace them in the spring. That was an old argument between them, but here and now he found it hard to voice it. Instead, he said, “You’re doing the best you can. Like Kit said, fifty thousand thalers buys a lot of food and firewood.”
“Not enough,” Yora muttered.
“It’ll be a start.”
“It’s getting cold,” Harrow said, coming up behind them. He gave Gyre a glare, then offered Yora a fur-lined coat. “Here.”
“Thank you, Harrow.”
Gyre took the opportunity to dig his own warm coat out of his pack. The air was definitely turning cold, and it would only get colder.
Ibb returned, frowning at his annotated map. “This is going to be harder than we thought,” he announced.
“How so?” Kit said, drifting in behind him.
“If we want to stay clear of trouble, we’ll need to avoid this set of galleries.” Ibb slid his finger across the map. “That means working our way through the side tunnels here. Once we’re past this junction, we can shift back over, I think.” He looked up at Kit. “If that’s all right with you, of course.”
“Like I told you,” she said, “I’ll let you know when I see something familiar.”
“If you’ve never been here before, how can it be familiar?” Yora muttered.
Not a bad question. But Gyre didn’t speak up, and Kit just smiled.
Beyond Beggar’s Rest, the temperature dropped with every step forward. The choking, red-hot fumes of the Pit were a long way behind them, and without that warmth there was no avoiding the fact that they were climbing through the bowels of a mountain in the tallest, coldest range in the world. Somewhere above his head, Gyre supposed, through thousands of meters of rock, were the glaciers that shrouded the Shattered Peaks in permanent winter. It was a strange thought.
Following the twins’ advice, they’d veered away from the main galleries, working their way through an interconnected network of narrow passages and round, nearly featureless rooms. Until this point, evidence of the original inhabitants of these tunnels had been scanty, with even worthless debris scraped up by some hopeful scavenger. Here they started to find scraps.
The ghouls, masters of dhaka but without access to deiat, hadn’t wrought their creations in unmetal and crystal like the Chosen. Much of their arcana had been biological, tools and implements grown to fit their purpose. Some of their tools had even been alive in their own right, a living creature used as a modern arcanist might wield a plier or a scalpel. Four hundred years had reduced most of these wonders to decomposed slime, but there were hints at what had been. Strange skeletons, coiled in nooks and crannies, and multichambered shells like mollusks. Bits of crystal and glass mixed with patches of phosphorescent fungi, marking the place where some ancient bit of arcana had found its resting place. On the ceiling, more glowing patches flickered fitfully to life as they approached.
Lynnia would have a field day. It was remnants like these that alchemists used as raw material.
There were signs, too, the queer spidery ideograms of ghoul scr
ipt carved into the stone. Kit stared at each marking they passed, but if she understood them, she wasn’t saying. She’d put on a heavy coat of her own, so big it dwarfed her thin body, making her look smaller. Every breath puffed into steam around her face, shrouding her in mist.
Finally she halted in front of one set of signs, studying them intently. Gyre stopped beside her. His scar itched under the chilly metal of his mask, and he fought the urge to scratch it.
“Can you read them?” Gyre said.
“Of course,” Kit said. “I told you I could find what we were looking for once we got close.” She turned to the others and pointed. “We need to go that way.”
Ibb glanced at the map and pulled a face. “That will take us across the main gallery. If we keep on from here for another few—”
“No guarantee we can find directions again farther on,” Kit said, tapping the Elder sign. “If we go too far, we might miss it entirely.”
Ibb glanced at Yora and Harrow. The big warrior gripped the handle of his axe.
“It’s too much of a risk,” Harrow said darkly. “If we get caught in the open by a large group…” He shook his head.
“Halfmask?” Yora said.
“It’s a big gallery,” Gyre said. “They can’t patrol the whole thing all at once. Maybe we’ll get lucky.”
“It’s a gamble,” Ibb said.
“I like gambles,” Kit said, grinning.
In the end, in spite of Harrow’s grumbles, there wasn’t much option. Nobody wanted to come this far and miss their objective.
A few twists led them back to the main gallery. It was a wide tunnel, the size of the streets out in the warm, living part of the city, but littered with stone and wreckage and rimed by frost. Curiously regular piles of metal and crystal lay about. A few had been scattered by scavengers, but most were intact, the inorganic wreckage sunk in black slime and ranks of mushrooms. A few more glowing patches came to fitful life on the high ceiling.
“There,” Kit said, pointing to another mark incised into the wall. “That way.”
Ibb gave her a dubious look but followed as she scampered down the corridor. The others fell in behind, with Gyre bringing up the rear. The larger space made Gyre’s skin crawl and set his scar to itching. Side tunnels branched off every dozen meters, leaving innumerable ways they could be outflanked and surrounded. Harrow was right. It’s too open. His jaw clenched.
But trouble, when it came, didn’t arrive from ambush. There was a chunk of fallen rock in the middle of the corridor, and as Ibb and Kit got within a few meters, a lantern came on, blindingly bright for eyes adapted to glowstone light. Gyre blinked away tears and saw a single figure clad in shabby black sitting on top of the rock. It looked like a man, but something was wrong, and it took another moment to process what: curling horns sprouted from his head, curving back on themselves and winding to a vicious-looking point.
“Hello, friends.” There was something strange about his voice, too, deeper and more resonant than it had any right to be. “You’re in Beloriel’s territory now. I assume you’re willing to pay the appropriate toll.”
Kit gave a quiet snort of derision, and her hand drifted toward the blaster at her side. Ibb stepped in front of her, signaling her to wait.
“That depends,” he said, “on how much the toll is. We’re fully prepared to be reasonable.”
“Oh, wonderful,” the horned man said. “I do love dealing with reasonable folks.” He cocked his head. “You’re well armed, for scavengers. Surely you don’t need two blasters, especially if you have our protection.”
“We’d prefer to pay in thalers, truth be told,” Ibb said, hands spread. “You know how one gets attached to one’s gear—”
The crack of a blaster going off ripped through the silence of the cavern, and the bright flash left dazzling afterimages in Gyre’s eye. Kit had her weapon out, aimed not at the horned man but at one of the piles of debris behind them. The bolt tore it apart, sending bits of stone and metal flying in all directions, and Gyre had a glimpse of a human figure pinwheeling away among the shrapnel.
For a moment, everyone was frozen. Then the horned man gave a roar, an echoing cry like a lion’s that filled the cavern. He leapt forward, unnaturally fast. Ibb swore and clawed for his own blaster, even as misshapen figures swarmed toward them from all directions.
Gyre offered a choice oath of his own, drawing a blade in each hand. The bandits had emerged from behind the mounds of rotting wreckage in twos and threes, dressed in thick leather and ragged furs. They were armed with a mix of knives and spears, with a few sporting improvised metal shields. Gyre could see at least a dozen, with probably as many behind him.
Kit fired twice more, one bolt sizzling high to explode against the rocky wall of the corridor, the other catching a charging bandit head-on and blasting him into grisly chunks. She had time to holster her blaster and draw her curved saber before two more were on top of her. Pivoting with a dancer’s grace away from a spear thrust, she brought her weapon down on the haft and cracked it, then ducked in time to evade the swipe of another man’s blade. Her momentum brought her sword around, striking sparks from his metal shield, and she rebounded off and turned the motion into a spinning kick that sent him stumbling. Before he could recover, she darted inside his guard and opened his throat with an easy motion.
Gyre had three opponents of his own, coming in fast but coordinating poorly. The first, a teenage girl with dark skin and fiery orange hair, screamed a war cry and swung her sword for his head with more passion than sense. Gyre sidestepped her, opening her bowels with a twist of his short knife and leaving her to collapse with guts spilling through her fingers. The man behind her had a shield and spear, jabbing expertly and keeping Gyre from closing. Gyre gave ground, letting the third bandit, a skinny boy with a pair of knives, get closer. Hopping over the shuddering body of the dying girl, Gyre circled, and the boy followed, swiping with his short blades.
Too tentative. With a knife that size, only a committed attack was going to cause any damage. Gyre waited until he wound up for another strike, then stepped forward, blocking one descending blade with a forearm and parrying the other, then punching the bandit in the mouth with his pommel. The boy staggered backward, drawing his knife along Gyre’s arm, but without his weight behind it the blade scraped off his leather bracer. More important, he was now between Gyre and the spearman, and Gyre kept pressing forward, driving the boy back and spoiling the more experienced man’s stance. Desperately, the boy lunged again, and Gyre ducked and swept his legs out from under him, then popped up inside the spearman’s guard. The older bandit dropped his spear and went for a sidearm, but Gyre’s knife took him in the throat before he could reach it.
Twisting to finish the boy on the ground, Gyre saw Yora and Harrow fighting back-to-back. Yora’s spearhead darted like a leaping fish, unmetal iridescent in the twisting, strobing light of glowstones and blaster fire. One bandit was down in front of her, and she held two more at bay. As Gyre watched, her spear licked out, the unmetal blade slicing clean through the ordinary steel of her opponent’s shield and opening a long gash on his arm. Behind her, Harrow fought with wild swings of his axe. A lithe young woman slipped inside his guard with a long knife, slashing his leg, but the boy slammed his forehead into hers, leaving her reeling. Before she could recover, he caught her on the backswing with his big axe, and she folded up around the blade like a limp rag and spun away in a spray of gore.
Ibb seemed to be having the most difficulty. The antler-man was quicker than he had any right to be, and his nails were as long and sharp as a thickhead’s claws. Ibb’s rapier was faster, but under his rags the dhak-twisted bandit was armored like a thickhead, too, and the fine-tipped blade skittered off his scales. The mercenary gave ground, bleeding freely from a cut to the scalp and another to the thigh.
Gyre moved in to assist, slashing wildly at the antler-man to draw his attention. He ducked as a clawed swipe whistled past, and lashed out with his short bl
ade, but the cut that should have opened the man’s stomach only slashed his clothes and glanced off his scaly armor. Gyre dropped his long blade just in time to catch the man’s wrist before the claws found his face, but the bandit’s prodigious strength forced him back, first one step and then another. For a moment they stood locked, sweat standing out on Gyre’s brow as he strained to keep the vicious razors back.
“Duck!”
This time, Gyre needed no further warning. He let go of the bandit’s arm and threw himself flat. The antler-man stumbled forward against the sudden lack of resistance, and Gyre felt a wave of heat and heard the crack of a blaster bolt. He raised his head and found Kit walking past him, blaster leveled. The antler-man was down but getting back to his feet. The huge crater blown in his chest, exposing the ragged, shattered tips of his ribs, barely seemed to slow him.
“Just die, would you?” Kit said. She fired twice more, and the third bolt caught the bandit in the head, blowing his skull to fragments. When she was satisfied he wasn’t getting up again, Kit holstered the blaster and reached out to help Gyre up. “You all right?”
“Somehow.” Gyre took her hand and stood. The fight seemed to be over, the remaining bandits having melted away into the darkness with the death of their leader. The five of them were left standing in a circle of bluish glowstone light, along with the bodies of the fallen. Somewhere a woman was shrieking in pain, and a man repeated frantic prayers in a gurgling voice.
Ibb, his face painted with blood from the wound on his forehead, limped to face Kit and leveled his rapier.
“What the fuck was that?” he said.
“What?” she said, raising her hands. “Saving your life? Or saving Halfmask’s, I suppose, after he saved yours?”
Ashes of the Sun Page 17
