The voice of Nina’s mother was silent. “Mommy?” she whispered.
She heard something else. The soft scrape of boot leather on stone.
Heart pounding wildly, Nina stepped back toward the shadow she’d come through, but it was solid stone now. Chad must’ve already closed the door to the shadow world.
Chad. Nina glanced to the side where she expected him to be, but he was gone. Nina was alone in there, with only one door leading out of the room.
Someone stepped into that doorway, wearing the blue and gray of Falconkeep.
Alicie.
Nina pressed herself against the wall, willing herself to disappear, but Alicie’s eyes were fixed on her as if Nina were the only thing in the world. A tight, joyless smile spread across the other girl’s face.
“They don’t think Vidden will make it,” Alicie said, her voice flat. She stepped into the room, arms loose at her side. “He got lost in the passageways, bleeding everywhere. He was nearly dead before anyone found him.” She chuckled. “All of us can do special things, amazing things, but not a one of us knows how to fix a simple wound like that. Healing isn’t something that matters much here.”
Nina slid across the wall, trying to put distance between her and Alicie, but ended up in the corner as the other girl slowly closed the distance between them. Alicie lifted her arms once she reached the box in the middle of the room, resting them on the lid she herself had hammered shut.
“Not that it matters,” Alicie continued. “Vidden had a couple of years left in him at most. Likely fewer.” Without touching the wood, Alicie moved her hand over the box’s lid. A thin ribbon of wood peeled away from it as if an invisible blade were shaving it. Her eyes never left Nina’s face. “He’s fortunate, you know. It’s one of the rules of Falconkeep. It’s forbidden to kill yourself. The best you can ever hope for is someone else killing you.” Her smile widened. “Lucky for you.”
Alicie’s smile vanished as she thrust her hand out.
Nina screamed as burning pain erupted in her wrist. Twin lines of blood oozed as her flesh slowly parted, cut like a ribbon.
Through the agony, she caught a glimpse of a shadowy form behind Alicie. Alicie shrieked as the form grabbed her hair, yanking her down.
It was Chad. His face was twisted with rage, so twisted that Nina scarcely recognized him. He raised his other hand, closed in a tight fist, the sharp ends of nails sticking out from between his fingers.
Before Alicie could raise either of her hands to attack him, Chad repeatedly punched his fist into her throat, nails ripping it to bloody shreds. When Alicie’s arms fell limp, Chad let go of her hair. Alicie’s body slumped to the ground.
Chad tossed the bloody nails away and squatted down next to Nina. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I was too late to stop her.”
Nina shook her head, eyes blurring from the tears. “You stopped her just fine.”
“I … I waited too long.” He glanced down. “I was scared.”
“Me too.”
Chad’s face paled as he inspected her arm. Two cuts corkscrewed around it. They looked shallower than they felt. “I think I know where some bandages are,” he said.
Nina shook her head and ripped a strip of cloth from the hem of her dress. It wasn’t clean, but at least it would stop the bleeding. She didn’t want to end up like Vidden. “We’ve got to get out of here.” Though she knew she wouldn’t see, Nina glanced around the room. “Mother, are you there?”
I’m always here, my love.
Tears spilled from Nina's eyes in relief. “How do we get out of here?”
The voice was silent a long moment. Your friend walks in the darkness. Is that where you were before?
“Yes.”
Good. Let your hands be your guide. A twisting of the air can trick your eyes, but it cannot trick your hands. Trust your hands to get yourself through the darkness. When your eyes and your hands do not agree, then you’ll know you’re on the right path.
A twisting in the air … an illusion? That must be how Lora Bale was keeping them there. “That will get us out of Falconkeep? Then what?”
Head northeast until you see the city. Our family waits for you there. I will do my best to warn them you are coming, but they aren’t special like you. Your father may heed me, though.
Her father? Wasn’t her father with her mother in Farshores? Nina let the odd comment pass, mind overflowing with enough as it was. “Thanks, mommy. I love you.”
I love you, too. More than life itself. Now go, my dear. Go and do not stop.
The sound of running boot steps reached them, getting louder. Chad grabbed Nina’s hand and quickly the two of them disappeared into shadow.
Chapter 40: Insects
Aswath of daylight fell across Marinack’s wings. The subtle heat from it occasionally caused the skin stretched across them, the color of boiled pork, to quiver, but Marinack didn’t flex her wings as she would’ve liked. She didn’t want to risk waking any of the ferals again. It had been a chore taking care of the last one that had woken up and escaped. Not because she had had to kill it—that brief surge of ecstasy she felt as its blood poured over her claws had been the only benefit of the ordeal—but because she had had to dispose of it and the human bodies it had left in its wake, all without being detected. That was why Marinack was here: to make sure that the Patterner Orthkalu’s plan wasn’t fouled by the unpredictable nature of the feral sheggam hibernating below her.
Their hibernation was the result of some Pattern made by Orthkalu; Marinack had no idea how it functioned. She only knew that the Pattern’s hold over them was tenuous. If it hadn’t been, there would’ve been no problem to begin with. Ferals tended to live up to their name. They were barely more than beasts, hardly capable of conscious thought—they were too overwhelmed by the Song of Pain to function as well as the warriors, or even the smokers. It wasn’t until they created their own harmony was the Song of Pain reduced from a maddening cacophony to a mere susurration of constant gnawing, a constant, endless scraping of the nerves that was as much sound as sensation. Only then could the rudiments of thought form.
None of the sheggam were fully immune to the Song of Pain, though. Sometimes, Marinack herself would have to flex her wings and fly just to fight back against the Song of Pain, scratch the itch that never went away, or risk going as mad as the ferals. That was what had happened the last time, and was why one of them had escaped, but there was nothing to be done for it. She had needed to get out of that cloying pit Orthkalu had sentenced them to.
Comfort, even in the relative sense, was an alien concept for the sheggam, but Marinack was really beginning to appreciate its absence. She was crouched on the cold, wet stone of her perch, completely surrounded by a rough tube of fungus-spotted natural stone—though everything about it seemed so unnatural. It was too dark, its edges too gritty and sharp.
And the constant smell of rot. There were no corpses she could see that would have caused this kind of stench, no traces of any life anywhere in this pit. Nor had they seen any seen any as their army made the long trek through the hot, barren tunnels that led here—had there been, the ferals would have killed it. The stench seemed to come from the very air, or maybe from the stones themselves. The smell had been present ever since they entered the ground back in Sheggamur, wafting up in vents. She hadn’t been able to decide if she hated it, or if it comforted her. It was both foreign and familiar, nostalgic and nauseating. In the end, though, she decided that she hated it. Anything that confused her so much was a plague unto itself.
She scraped her claws against the stone, gritting her teeth against the harsh sound she herself had made. Even her teeth itched. Every muscle in her body ached to break free of this prison of waiting. She knew she couldn’t. Timing, Orthkalu had said, was everything, and only Marinack could make sure things went as planned. Only she could be trusted.
That trust was all the separated from the beasts below her.
However, there were circumstance
s that could change the timing. Discovery was one. That was why Marinack had killed that feral and cleaned up its mess. Only the ruler of these reeking stone towers, a human woman named Shad, knew that Marinack and the ferals were down here. If anyone else knew that sheggam had burrowed under the Hated Wall, they would collapse the tunnels, or flood them. Orthkalu had set up several Patterns that acted like tripwire alarms, keyed to Marinack’s hearing. Again, she didn’t know how they worked, only that it wasn’t mere proximity that would set them off—thousands of humans lived around these stone towers, swarming about them like insects. No, it was something closer to discovery. If someone was on the verge of merely knowing that the sheggam were here, Marinack would hear a clear, sharp sound. She could then signal the ferals to awaken and begin their rampage.
Marinack often found herself straining to listen for that sound. Orthkalu could do things that she couldn’t believe or even begin to understand, but he, like everything in this world, wasn’t perfect. What if he had made a mistake with this Pattern? What if a human had discovered them, but Marinack hadn’t heard the sound? What if she had heard it, but mistook it for something else?
Uncertainty wormed through, and it had for days. With nothing else to do, she listened, cursing the ferals whenever they twitched or yelped in their sleep.
Now, the pressure was almost too much to bear, almost greater than the burden of her responsibility. She was becoming convinced that timing was meaningless to Orthkalu, that it was all about control with him. Besides, what difference would a few days matter? They would kill humans no matter what, and the humans were helpless to stop it.
Narrowing her eyes, she looked up. It was late morning, judging by the brightness. Not the best time to stage an attack, but the humans were doubtless fat with complacency. They had been protected by the Hated Wall for centuries; there was no way they were ready for a sheggam invasion from beneath one of their own cities, even in daylight.
Despite every instinct screaming at her to rouse the ferals and fly up the tube and out into the sky, she waited. And waited. And waited.
Her patience was finally rewarded.
A clear chime sang through her mind, drowning out all other sounds, and then faded away.
It was time.
Marinack let out a roar that tore at her throat, one that echoed madly throughout the tube. Feral eyes, alight with sudden hunger, flashed open. The warriors and the smokers that had come with them also roused, but without the mindless ferocity of the ferals—their eyes were hungry, but not without sense. As the echoes of Marinack’s bellow began to fade, the ferals, too, let out a roar. Their voices created a Song of Pain of their own, one that would haunt the humans as much as it did them.
The ferals wasted no time, bounding up stone protrusions, climbing easily with their claws crunching into the stone, making holds were there were none. Marinack took a moment to savor the sight. It was magnificent to watch—muscles flexing beneath pale skin, a horde of bodies flooding up the walls of the tube, bent on nothing but the rending of flesh. It wasn’t long before the first of the ferals reached the end of the tube and crawled over. She couldn’t hear the screams of the humans here, in this tower of stone and stench, at least not yet, but Marinack knew it would only be a matter of time before the screams of the injured and dying would be heard from shore to shore.
The itching in Marinack’s teeth finally overwhelmed her. A few beats of her wings, and she was above the rim of the pit, airborne. Below, a handful of the ferals began to tear each other apart in their haste to taste blood. Marinack let them, and pulled back her lips to expose her sharp teeth. A few dead ferals wouldn’t make a difference. There were plenty more where they came from.
The wind whistled in her ears as Marinack flew out of the tube and circled about, eyeing the ferals as they overcame the human settlement on this tower. Destruction spread below like the ashes of a paper held over a candle flame—slow, but relentless, absolute, and irreversible. First handfuls of humans fell, then dozens, then hundreds. The panic spread even more quickly. Marinack had circled only twice before the pandemonium spread to the second tower. Soon, all twelve of them would be overcome.
Marinack longed to join the fray, but a more powerful urge overcame her. As she turned her head west, the chime filled her head again. The ones who had discovered the presence of the sheggam were still out there. The desire to kill them, to tear them to pieces, throbbed through Marinack’s body—likely the result of Orthkalu’s Pattern, but Marinack didn’t mind. The yearning for blood felt almost as good as feeling it wet her claws.
She could feel how close they were by the changes in the sound’s pitch. They were close—very close. Marinack could see farther than most birds, and though the sunlight hampered her greatly, it wasn’t long before she could pick out two figures on horseback, briskly riding along a lightly wooded trail.
Quivering with anticipation, Marinack pulled in the tips of her wings and prepared for the dive.
* * *
“What’s wrong?” Stem asked.
“Quiet, idiot.” Penellia pinched the bridge of her nose with her eyes closed. Then she sighed. She almost apologized, but she didn’t want Stem to think he could suddenly become impertinent with his questions. She did, however, soften her tone somewhat. “I’m not sure what’s wrong. Something …”
Something in the Pattern she had been tracing. A fold, deliberately placed. And subtle, too. Only a few Patterners alive today were capable of something like this. Yet the flavor of this fold in the Pattern tasted all wrong to her. Its signature was impossible for her detect. It was far too … alien.
Which only meant that her prior suspicions had been correct. She snapped the reins and led her beast on, Stem following suit after a moment’s hesitation. Their mounts carefully picked their way down a slightly stony slope wending through the trees. Tall ferns whipped at Penellia’s knees, but at least the morning mist had burned away. She was tired of being in the saddle and wanted a bath. She told herself that she would take one once she arrived at Twelve Towers and sorted this mess out, but she knew it was only a comforting lie.
The sheggam. Here, in the Accord.
How?
The real question was how to deal with them. If they truly were here, they must be hiding in Twelve Towers, in the hollow pillars of volcanic rock themselves. They were there; that’s all that mattered. They hadn’t yet made themselves known, but that could change at any moment. Penellia had to do something before it was too late, but she couldn’t decide what action to take until she learned more. She had to go to Twelve Towers and see for herself.
The trees ahead thinned, and Penellia could finally catch glimpses of the nearest of the towers. They were closer than she had thought. The cylindrical stone formation was squat. Signs of human habitation spiraled up its steeply inclined sides: walkways carved into its sides; light, wooden structures attached to them; a network of scaffolding holding it all together. It bustled with activity, more than she had expected given Twelve Towers’ current ruler’s penchant for control.
Historians had long wondered why the founders of Twelve Towers had built their city on the sides of the towers, rather than at their bases. Some had thought that it was more easily defensible, but that was simply not true: the collection of structures wrapped around each tower was so precarious, so close to the brink of collapse, that shoddy construction workers could be as dangerous as saboteurs. A committed siege would devastate Twelve Towers, high ground or not. No, Penellia had studied the people alive in Andrin’s time, the same time Twelve Towers had been settled. They were weary and beaten, but they had also survived the greatest threat ever to face humanity. Many of them were filled with ambition, ambition that even the sheggam hadn’t crushed—something that Penellia could scarcely imagine, particularly in this age of mediocrity. Penellia imagined that the founders of Twelve Towers had decided to live on the towers’ sides simply because of the practical and engineering challenges it presented. Such challenges would s
eem like nothing to those who had fought the sheggam and lived to tell about it. Building Twelve Towers would have been nothing short of a celebration of their own survival.
Penellia would have loved to take a moment to marvel at this rare showing of human ingenuity, but the odd feeling she had gotten when she had stumbled into that fold began to grow into a headache, pulsing more heavily with every passing moment. It was getting hard to think. She called them to a stop again and leaned against her saddle horn, staring at her mount’s neck, to catch her breath.
Something was very, very wrong.
Stem craned his neck and shielded his eyes from the sun. “I see something. In the sky. Flying.”
“As opposed to swimming?” Penellia snorted. “Considering there are only a few forms of creature capable of flight, I’m wagering it’s a bird.” Sometimes she wondered how she had survived this long with Stem at her side.
Stem’s nose wrinkled up as he squinted. “No, I don’t think so.”
Not a bird? Penellia didn’t like the sound of something flying that wasn’t a bird. She lifted her head. The sky was bright, and she could only make a silhouette. But Stem was right. It was too large to be a bird.
It was coming from Twelve Towers. Headed their way.
She realized what that fold in the Pattern had been. An alarm.
“Shores take me.” She spun her horse around and heeled it into a hard gallop. “Stem, ride! Ride!”
Chapter 41: Patterns in the Dirt
The pounding of hooves jarred Penellia’s teeth. For once, she wished she had brought a sturdier mount, one used to galloping through rough terrain. But how could she have known that she would need one?
How could she have possibly known that the only thing between her and death would be the speed of her horse?
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