“The Triad is expecting me, Farnid.”
“Of course. I was informed of your meeting with them.” Farnid opened the white door and moved aside.
Code strode through the entrance into yet another antechamber. Doors to his left and to his right led to the corridor that encircled the central room, but Code went straight to the large red door that led into the central chamber, and stepped into the Heart of the Void.
Kosarin’s tastes were no less ostentatious in the Heart of the Void itself. Alternating white, red, and black marble tiles spanned the floor, and the same colors trimmed the walls and furniture. Torches, lamps, and a large chandelier at the center of the chamber illuminated the space brightly. Cabinets, and shelves full of books lined the walls. This was not the Nazaniin’s official library; it was the Triad’s private collection.
Waiting for him in the Heart of the Void, seated around the great map table at the center of the room beneath the chandelier, were Kosarin, Sirana, and Rune.
Code saluted, arm diagonal across his chest, and then flashed a smile, despite his hackles rising. “A summons, so soon after my return. To what do I owe the pleasure?” Code seated himself opposite the Triad at the large circular table. The map, a relief model of the Sfaera, rose between them. “It’s rare I get to see the three of you all in one place.”
“We have a mission for you, Code,” Kosarin said. He was twenty years Code’s senior, at least. His spectacles and freshly shaved head reflected the chandelier’s light. A white, impeccably trimmed circle beard was the only hair on his head. Seated as he was, he looked more like a particularly prim librarian than the Venerato of the Citadel and Triadin of the Nazaniin. But Kosarin was far more powerful, physically, than he let on. And psimantically speaking… well, there was a reason he was the leader of the Nazaniin. As he spoke, he peered over his spectacles at Code, for all the world like a stern father. Kosarin twirled a small figurine in one hand, close to the surface of the map table.
The word “mission” hit Code like a punch in the gut. “How can I serve, Triadin?” Code asked, hiding his surprise.
“This is a mission of a different sort.” Sirana’s hands were folded on the table. Her red hair, impeccably bound in a single ponytail, was longer than it used to be. Sirana had gone through a period of… oddness, after Lathe’s disappearance. Hair unkempt, clothing disheveled. Highly unusual for someone of her stature, and even more unusual for Sirana herself. There had even been talk of her stepping down from the Triad. But now, she looked as elegant as ever. “Different than what you are used to, at least. But we needed our best agent.”
Code resisted the urge to raise one eyebrow. There was usually only one reason the Triad requested Code’s services specifically. He did not have a cotir of his own—not since Andrinar. If they needed a one-man job, he was the psimancer to do it.
Rune cleared his throat. Of the three members of the Triad, Rune had always been the odd man out. He was younger even than Code, perhaps twenty-six summers. His clothing was poorly tailored, and his long brown hair unkempt, strands always falling in his face. But Code knew better than to underestimate the voyant. He had only seen Rune’s psimantic abilities in action a handful of times, but between what he had seen and the rumors he had heard, there was no psimancer of the Sfaera more powerful than this man. Kosarin was more experienced, Sirana more nuanced and tactical, but when it came to raw power, no one could match Rune.
That is, until the rumors of the tiellan psimancer from the north. The Chaos Queen might be able to challenge the entire Triad.
“Are you sure you want to send me away from Triah?” Code asked, masking his anxiety. “With the Odenite group at our gates and the tiellans on the move, I could—”
“Your next mission will keep you in Triah.” Rune spoke over Code. “You are to befriend the psimancer previously known as Lathe. Gain his confidence. His services may prove valuable to us soon.”
“You want me to befriend Lathe Tallon?”
“He is no longer Lathe Tallon,” Sirana said, her voice hard and flat. “He is someone else entirely. Whatever rivalry existed between the two of you is over.”
“Lathe is really gone, then?” Code asked.
“For our purposes, we must consider it so,” Rune said.
The answer was cryptic as Oblivion, but then again, half the things Rune said made no sense whatsoever.
“The man wearing Lathe’s body calls himself Knot, now,” Kosarin said. “He is valuable to us. Not only does he act as a general and guard captain for the Odenites, but it is rumored he is married to the tiellan woman, Danica Winter Cordier. If we can exploit one of those relationships, good. If we can exploit both, all the better. You need to gain his trust, Code. Sirana will brief you further on your target. She has already had some… interaction with him.”
Sirana returned Code’s questioning glance with a cold and empty stare. He wondered why Sirana hadn’t nominated herself to gain the target’s trust, why she had left it to somebody like Code, who had never got on with Lathe.
Code almost asked the Triad if they knew about Alain and Morayne’s arrival in the city, or about the note that had led them here. But something stopped him. Had they been behind the note, they weren’t going to tell him now if they hadn’t already.
Goddess, he hated these games. Give him an enemy to fight, that was one thing. But intrigue had never suited him.
The Triad stood, and Code stood with them. He saluted Kosarin and Rune as they left the table, and then he was left staring across the map of the Sfaera at Sirana, mountains and cities rising between them.
“Have a seat,” Sirana said. “And let me tell you about my husband, and what he has become.”
12
Somewhere beneath Triah
ASTRID AWOKE IN DARKNESS. It was true darkness, unilluminated by the green glow of her eyes, which meant it was daytime outside. How long had it been since Cabral had taken her?
The damp air clung to her skin and clothes, and it smelled wet; mildew and mold, and ancient rainwater and seawater both. The ground beneath her was dirt and rock, grimy and uneven, jagged edges of stone that jabbed her as she felt her way around. The only sound she could hear besides her own scuffling was a slow, irregular, DRIP drip-DRIP of water.
None of this helped her. But then, that would be Cabral’s intention, to imprison her somewhere completely disorienting. The bastard was lucky she’d woken up during the day; if she’d awoken at night, she’d have more strength to escape.
She’d been Cabral’s captive before. She had escaped him before.
Because of Trave, both times, said a small voice inside her.
The chamber was narrow, and the only egress a large wood-and-iron door in the middle of one bowing wall. The length of the chamber, however, baffled her. She’d walked away from the door, trailing her hand on the wall at her side for half an hour before she turned and made her way back to the door. The whole length she’d walked—the tunnel, as it seemed— remained roughly six rods wide, but continued, at a slight downhill slope, for some time. The syncopated DRIP drip-DRIP of water came from further down the tunnel, away from the door, but how far she could not guess. No light reached her no matter where she walked in the tunnel; it was always darker than midnight.
Astrid yearned for night to fall so she could finally see something, even if it was just bare, grimy dirt and stone. When that happened, she’d explore the tunnel as far as she could. She could not imagine the place held any sort of real exit—Cabral would never make escape easy for her—but she could not help but hope.
So she waited at the wooden door. She waited for her retractable claws to sprout, half again the length of her child-fingers. She waited for her teeth to elongate and sharpen into fangs, for her bones, muscle, and skin to strengthen and harden.
She would try to burst through the door with brute force once night fell. The wood was damp, almost rotten, and while it was reinforced with iron Astrid could smell the rust when she put her nose
close, could feel the corrosion. She could bend iron, perhaps even break it if it was already weakened.
But why would Cabral allow it?
Astrid did not have to wait long to find out why.
A small green glow soon began to illuminate her surroundings. As the sun set, her eyes grew brighter, until they were two tiny burning green suns.
The tunnel extended as far as her eyes could discern. The roof of the tunnel was much higher than she’d expected. But the more Astrid looked around, the more she wasn’t sure she could call the place either a cave or a tunnel. The floor was dirt and rock, certainly, but the walls were cut stone blocks and mortar, manmade. Above her, a complex network of wooden rafters supported the stone ceiling.
Astrid shivered. The structure seemed stable enough, but certainly not impervious to collapse. Perhaps that was Cabral’s intention: to bury her alive in an impenetrable tomb of crumbled stone, wood, and grime. He would leave her to rot and desiccate for the rest of eternity.
All the more reason to get out while she still could.
The door had no handle or opening mechanism that she could see, but the hinges faced her. That was odd. If she were in a cell of some kind, the hinges ought to be on the other side, out of her reach. Hinges were invariably the weakest part of any door; remove the hinge mechanism, and breaking the lock was just a matter of applying enough force.
It was easy enough to dig into the rusting hinges with her claws, and pry them apart. Soon, three iron bolts had fallen to the floor.
Astrid moved to face the door head-on, the wood and metal lit in an eerie green light by her own eyes. She tried not to let the stab of hope she felt at removing the hinges affect her.
This will not turn out the way you think, she told herself. Cabral will have planned plot after plot around every eventuality of your escape.
But was that really true? Was Cabral as brilliant as he professed? She had always thought he was, and yet she’d escaped his clutches twice now.
Astrid knocked sharply three times. Thunp, thunp, thunp.
It wasn’t hollow, but it wasn’t a continuous single block of wood, either. Instead, planks roughly the width of Astrid’s stretched hand were stacked side by side, and three metal bands, corresponding with the hinge placements, wrapped horizontally around them.
But the dull thunp sound the door had made when she rapped on it was the best news. It was damp, certainly, perhaps all the way through. She guessed at least one lock would be placed around the middle of the door, near the central iron band.
Astrid planted her feet firmly. Then she kicked the middle band close to where it met the stone wall with all of the strength she could muster. The door quivered. Astrid kicked again, and again and again, and while the door did not burst outward as she hoped, it did continue to shudder clammily in its frame.
Astrid looked more closely at the door. While it had hardly budged, she did notice something else promising. The metal band she had struck repeatedly with her foot had pressed into the wood behind it so far that the wood swelled outward above and below the iron.
Progress was progress. Astrid planted her feet at an angle to the door, clenched her fist, and drove her hand into the wood above the metal band where it bulged outward. With her enhanced strength and hardened skin, muscles, and bone, it was like hitting it with a hammer the size of a child’s fist, and hers plunged satisfyingly into the wood, damp splinters jutting out around her hand.
For the first time since waking up in her strange cell, Astrid allowed herself a smile.
She had not punctured all the way through the wood, but her fist had sunk half its length into the swell. Astrid pulled back again, and hammered her fist into the door. Again. Again.
THUNF. THUNF. THUNF.
Then, with a THFOOK, she burst through. Warm air greeted her fist as it penetrated the door, much warmer than the air on her side of the portal. She had not realized it was so cold in her prison.
She searched for a locking mechanism, and found one—a sturdy slide bolt, easy enough to manipulate once she slipped her arm through up to her bicep. With a slide and a clank, the bolt slipped free.
She kicked the door again. It quivered significantly more this time, but still did not move from its frame.
Astrid went to work on the bottom lock, punching her way through the wood near the bottom band. She moved quickly, the sweet smell of hope sharp in her nostrils, and soon had the bottom lock unbolted as well.
She took a step back. The top metal band was higher than she could reach, and it would be significantly more difficult to break through up there. She could climb, bracing herself on the hole in the middle she had already made, but she would not be able to leverage enough force in that position. Best not to bother. She hoped there was only one lock remaining, and that the damage she’d done to the door had weakened it enough for her to break her way through.
If it hadn’t, now that she knew the integrity of the door (or lack thereof), she could always punch her way through as a last resort. Her hand ached, despite her enhancements, but the pain would be worth her freedom.
Fortunately, she did not have to resort to that. With three firm kicks, punching her foot downward at the bottom band of the door, it swung open enough for her to push her way through and into the chamber beyond.
But, as Astrid looked around at her new surroundings, the hope she’d felt turned to a horrible, sickening pain.
She was in a circular stone chamber, with no ceiling above her. Instead, the walls of the chamber jutted upward, up and up, and in the distance she could see a hint of the night sky above, the indifferent stars twinkling. For a moment, as she gazed up at them, Astrid had the most unreasonable reaction to the lights above her.
She feared them. She feared them like she’d never feared anything else before, anything in her life. She could not explain it, other than a great dread that overtook her, that pierced her hardened skin and toughened muscle and bone, penetrating her and surrounding her all at once. She wanted to cower against the ground, to run back into the dark tunnel from whence she’d sprung.
But she couldn’t. She couldn’t because of who lay here in the chamber, dead on the dirt floor.
How had Cabral done this? How had he taken all of them, or even known who to take?
Two bodies lay in the center of the chamber.
Knot and Cinzia.
Dead, because of her.
Cinzia had been beaten to death with the sort of viciousness that only a vampire could manage; two bloody, gaping holes stared from where her beautiful eyes had once been. Astrid would not have recognized her, except for her autumn-colored hair and the Trinacrya she wore around her neck. Two corners of the golden triangle were clean and pure, one reflecting the starlight above, but the third corner was dark, and as Astrid looked more closely, she saw it was crusted in blood.
Astrid reached out and caressed her friend’s skin. Something inside her swelled, building and building, threatening to burst.
She turned to Knot.
The feeling of dread compounded, increased without limit. As she approached, she understood why.
Knot had a ragged wound on his neck. A wooden stake impaled each limb. There was a lot less blood than there should have been. Almost none, in fact; just a dribble, crusted around Knot’s lips.
Astrid clutched her chest, where she felt the greatest pain she had ever felt in the long life she could remember boring into her, hollowing her out, carving away until she was nothing but a husk of vampiric intent.
Knot’s eyes snapped open, emitting a bright red light of their own. The color burst into Astrid’s world, conflicting sharply with the green light her own eyes emitted. Knot’s mouth opened.
You did this to me, she imagined him saying. This is your fault, you little bitch—I wish I had never met you—
But he made no sound.
The stars looked down indifferently on the dead and undead alike, and Astrid feared them.
With a sob mixed with a
scream of despair, anger, and horror, Astrid turned and burst back through the door she’d broken through, leaving the terrible starlit chamber, and sprinted down the tunnel, down, down, deep into the Sfaera, away from her friends and away from the dead as quickly as her feet would take her.
* * *
She ran until her muscles ached and cried out. The tunnel went on and on, and she began to wonder if she was running through the exact same stretch of stone, dirt, and wood over and over again.
She ran until, finally, the tortuous loop of the tunnel widened into a larger torchlit chamber, the ceiling twice as high. Astrid stumbled to a stop, her breath ragged and halting.
Two vampires stood in the center of the hall. One was a woman, young, dark-skinned, muscular and beautiful, long braided hair tied in a large knot at the top of her head. Colorful flowing robes elongated her already tall, majestic frame. Astrid stared in shock. The woman’s eyes glowed yellow. Every other vampire on the Sfaera she had encountered had red eyes, as did the other vampire standing with this woman.
The other vampire was Olin Cabral.
“It took you longer than I had hoped, but here you are,” Cabral said, smiling. “We’ve been waiting for you.”
If Cabral was here, this was real. What Astrid had witnessed in the starlit cave—
“Was not real,” the female vampire said.
“You could have kept up the ruse a bit longer,” Cabral muttered. The creases around his red glowing eyes, still locked on Astrid, bespoke nothing but amusement.
“Your friends are not dead,” the woman said, ignoring Cabral. No one treated Cabral this way—as if he were inconsequential. Even more surprising was the fact that he didn’t seem to care. The Cabral Astrid knew would have made an example of—and then killed—anyone who treated him like that.
“Who are you?” Astrid asked, staring at the woman unabashedly.
“You may call me Elegance. The vision you experienced was of my own making.”
A vision. Was Elegance a psimancer of some kind? Astrid had never heard of psimantic abilities surviving the transition from human to vampire.
Chaos Queen--Fear the Stars (Chaos Queen 4) Page 10
