He’d hauled the man bodily up the stairs to where he wouldn’t see Keely (or a set of wet footprints on the stairs ahead) before he could regain any semblance of his senses.
Even now, that semblance of his senses remained limited, but at least he was able to stumble back up the stairs under his own power, provided Ulric assisted him with issues of balance. He’d also been able to speak clearly and coherently enough to share that his name was Clay Ambleforth, but not much else yet.
“C’mon!” Clay protested, ignoring Ulric’s question, and not for the first time. “You saw her! Y’had t’ see her! She was standin’ right at your shoulder!” His speech came slow and slurred and stammering, as from someone who was having a great deal of difficulty forging thoughts into words, and even more difficulty recalling how to operate his tongue.
“I wasn’t looking over my shoulder,” Ulric told him. “I saw you fall. I ran down to help. By the time I got there, you’d already got to the edge of the stairs and I just helped you out.”
Keely fidgeted, drumming her fingertips silently against her own arm as she climbed the stairs. Keeping track of the two men by the sounds of their voices and footfalls alone was not the least bit difficult, but slowing her pace to match Clay’s so she was always one rotation directly below them had already become wearisome.
“I didn’ jus’ get t’ the edge of the stairs. I haven’t swum a stroke in my life!”
“Whatever happened, whatever you saw, I can’t tell you I saw your mysterious lady, okay? And the Inquisition’s around,” Ulric said. “They tend to frown on folk having unsanctioned visions, so I’d just keep it all to myself if I was you. But what are you even doing down here?”
There followed a long silence before Keely heard Clay finally answer, slowly and deliberately and surprisingly clearly, “Living a nightmare.” She heard them start walking again, but the conversation seemed to have died from Ulric not knowing how to respond to that. Eventually, it was Clay who broke the silence again. “Acshully, ’m more sure she’s real ‘n I’m sure you are.”
“Well, if it helps any to hear, I’m not sure I’m real either,” Ulric said sympathetically.
“Least y’haven’t turnt into anythin’ dreadful yet,” Clay sighed in exhaustion. “I do ‘preciate that.”
“Well, we’ll get you back up to the construction site and…”
“No! I’ve got to find the book!” All at once there came a scuffling and cursing, and Keely leaned outward as far as she dared in the hopes of seeing what was going on above her. For a heart-stopping moment she saw Ulric’s feet dangling off of the stair, scrabbling for purchase, before he managed to pull himself back up—presumably with a strong grip on Clay, because there wasn’t much else on the stair that one could hold onto.
After only a moment’s hesitation, Keely was a cat again, leaving her cloak to flutter once more to the stair as she dashed madly around and upward. It wasn’t just the thought of Ulric’s near fall that panicked her. It was the thought of diving in after him if he didn’t recover gracefully on his own. Her mind was still trying to come to terms with what she’d seen down there, and it was in no way ready for round number two. Caution was no longer an option, and her feline body had it all over her human one for accelerating up those stairs.
The sight of the two men struggling as she rounded the stairwell did nothing to put her mind at ease. Ulric had the clear advantage in training and in having his wits about him, but Clay had the clear advantages of being berserk out of his wits and of being muscled by a lifetime of heavy labor. By going from marginally coherent to completely unhinged in the blink of an eye, Clay had also started off with the advantage of surprise, and Ulric was clearly still fighting to recover from that. Still, Clay seemed more panicked than angry, and Keely couldn’t help thinking he’d have run off after an initial shove if Ulric hadn’t been forced to grab him to keep from falling. Now the two men seemed only to concern themselves with overpowering the other in order to gain control of the situation.
Given a few more moments, Keely might have found a way to play peacemaker—but Clay had found a good-sized fragment of rock that had chipped off of some part of the architecture and was trying to smash it into Ulric’s skull. Without breaking pace, Keely came bouncing off the wall and the steps and landed squarely in the middle of Clay’s back, her claws sinking straight through the filthy cloth of his tunic and finding purchase in his flesh. Clay howled, reflexively dropping the stone to grab for the yowling demon just out of his reach behind him.
The result wasn’t all good, as the falling rock still struck a glancing blow off of Ulric’s forehead, the jagged edge cutting a bloody line across his temple before bouncing away.
Ulric was able to shake off the painful distraction more quickly than Clay could shake off his, though, and Ulric laid the man out with one solid punch to the jaw. Then all was still and silent except for their heavy breathing and the once-more naked Keely asking Ulric if he was all right as she peered out from behind the man who’d collapsed backward on top of her. Then like the final punctuation to some morbid punch line, the splash of the offending rock finally hitting the water echoed up the shaft to them.
“Are you okay?” Keely finally asked.
“How is it,” Ulric said, eying Keely’s feet where they stuck out from under Clay, “that you never lose those boots no matter how many times you turn into a cat, but you can’t keep a cloak on for anything?”
“Nobody messes with my footwear,” Keely assured him. “Besides, if magic just made sense, we wouldn’t call it magic, now would we?”
As soon as she’d satisfied herself that all was as well as could be, Keely became the cat again and, wriggling out from under Clay, went trotting off down the stairs to fetch her cloak. She was most of the way to it when she realized there was an odd sound whispering at the edge of her hearing, and she peered over the edge of the stair, down into the depths of the shaft, trying to pinpoint its source.
The sound came as gurgling, she realized; a bubbling, as if the dark waters far below had begun to lazily swirl and churn. The thought froze Keely in her tracks as the recollection of what lay beneath forced its way back to the front of her mind.
The pool was one big watery graveyard. The dead lay in careless heaps across the bottom, dragged down by chains and by metal weights and by large rocks that made it clear they’d been interred there quite intentionally. Naked rib cages and femurs and all manner of other bones that Keely couldn’t name lay strewn about both in bits and in mostly intact skeletons, like the hoard of some macabre aquatic dragon. They lay so thick and ancient that there was no seeing the actual floor, and no telling how far down the mounds might go.
As if that all weren’t dreadful enough, not all of the corpses were bare bones. Some lay in varying states of stomach-churning decay, and Keely couldn’t help but wonder how long a corpse could last in that water before being reduced to pure bone, even if there was nothing lurking down there, cleaning the flesh from them. Certainly, there was no way that all of those bodies could be blamed on some long-dead cult.
Then in one final insult to Keely’s view of living in a world possessed of some passing acquaintance with safety and sanity, there was the business of the heads. Or, rather, there was the business of the lack of heads. Not once in surveying that wreckage of what had once been a living, breathing mass of humanity—carrying all the hopes and joys and fears and beauty and ugliness that went with it—did Keely spot a single head or skull; not so much as a jawbone.
Now something down there had been disturbed in those awful black waters, and Keely thought she could see a faint, flickering swirl of red meandering through their depths. She tore herself away from the sight and fought to shove all those unsettling thoughts back into the little box she reserved in the back of her brain for anything that made her suspect for even a moment that she might not be in charge of a given situation.
For the first time in years, though, Keely found she was shoving too much into that box, and s
he couldn’t close the lid. Things were going wrong. Lots of things were going wrong, and one of them even had her wondering whether there might be some point to the Inquisition beyond terrorizing the innocent.
Whether by the hand of man or demon, something unspeakable had happened here—was probably still happening here—and as Miraculata Cosima had said, war is a cruel business. If this was even close to typical to the things the Inquisition was fighting, it would explain how hard their hearts had become.
Keely reached the cloak she’d left on the stair and stopped, staring at it. In her mind she was seeing it as she’d originally found it, draped across a scarecrow, the hood half concealing a weathered skull gazing back at her with empty eyes.
Then she was seeing that over and over as imagined scarecrows in every field loomed nightmarishly closer and closer in her mind’s eye, each one of them pointedly not sitting on the shoulders of one of the bodies in the watery grave below. Keely backed away from the cloak, hackles raising and a feline growl coming unbidden to her throat.
“Keely?!” Ulric called down, concerned.
Keely, turned back into a woman and swept the cloak off the edge of the stairs with a quick swipe of her hand, recoiling from it even as she did so. “The cloak fell!” she called, watching it flutter away down the shaft. “I’m going to need your tunic unless you want me to just stay a cat!”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Bilge Glyphs
“This day gets better and better and better.” Countess Violet Haywood sighed as she mounted the last step out of the great shaft and onto the very pinnacle of the Wolf’s Tooth.
A severely dressed middle-aged woman, tall and trim and fit, Violet could have passed for a rather stern governess who’d softened just enough to charm the lord of the castle, married him, then had her existing wardrobe sensibly altered into something with adequate panache and sparkle to be taken seriously at court. Whatever her actual story might have been, she was in no mood to offer it.
A watch tower had once stood on this spot, many centuries ago, but now lay in a jumbled ruin of cracked, moss-covered stone beside the pit, all traces of it invisible from below. That no one had bothered to rebuild it certainly seemed more sensible than that it had ever been built in the first place, given that placing a watchtower here seemed rather like offering a step stool to a giant so he could see over the kids at a puppet show.
Even without it, the pinnacle offered an unobstructed view of the fields and pastures and orchards and streams and villages spread out in a patchwork far below, and far off to the hazy horizon. Only the thickly forested slopes to the west created any blind spot, and in their case, another forty or fifty feet wouldn’t have made much difference. If nothing closer had blocked the view, the stark white line of cliffs rising some miles back among the trees would have managed it.
Time and weather had taken their toll here not just on the ancient watch tower, but on the mouth of the pit, as well. Huge cracks had formed in the stones of what had once been a courtyard, radiating out from the pit like fractures in a glass mirror that had been struck with a rock. A few chunks of stone about the size of a grown man had sheared away and fallen into the pit some time long ago, and a couple of even larger shards looked poised to take the plunge should anyone step on them carelessly.
Violet crossed the remains of the courtyard, the wind of the heights tousling the few loose strands it could find of her dark, neatly done-up auburn hair as she picked her way carefully over the rocks and around the scraggly grasses. Behind her trailed Nolan and Elissa, the latter of whom seemed quite anxious and uncertain. They skirted the pit, leaving it a wide berth, until they arrived at the edge of the rubble where Keely sat with Ulric upon the fallen stones.
Keely now wore a rough workman’s tunic that fell off one shoulder and hung to her knees—having been made for someone much larger than herself—and a pair of scuffed, sturdy leather work boots that fitted her perfectly. Ulric had acquired the tunic for her when they’d paused most of the way up the stair, and he’d slipped out the side passage that came out behind some rocks near the cathedral site. He’d quickly found someone he could trust to deliver a message to Nolan, then borrowed the tunic from a friend on the work crew.
How they’d wound up with the boots, why they fit Keely so well, and why she’d traded in the much-nicer pair she’d been wearing for these old things were details that Ulric had managed to miss.
“This morning,” Violet began calmly, “I ate my breakfast across from the crocodile smile of an inquisitrix who clearly thinks her friends should have killed me the last time they were in town. Then I had to go off and leave my husband to dance with the Inquisition on his own and hope he’d still be there when I got back, because someone had to come up here and sort things out at the cathedral site. Since then, I’ve learned that the damage to the cathedral was twice what anyone had been admitting, that the workers think the site is cursed and they’re nearly ready to walk off, that the county has become infested with a plague of witches, and that someone’s house is on fire down at the bottom of the hill. Oh, and that half the players in next week’s Allanaves pageant have just declared they’ll never take the stage with the other half because of some business about a pig and three bolts of silk.
“So now I’ve got to broker peace between them, or else decide which of the county’s two most influential families I’d rather insult. I’ve already got an army’s worth of people beating on my door, demanding I solve all of their problems yesterday—if not sooner—so please, please tell me that…”
Violet stopped suddenly, staring at Keely through narrowed eyes. “Your hair is white. Why is your hair white?” She’d had only a perfunctory introduction to Keely and Elissa when they’d been drafted to take over where Sister Petra had left off, and honestly hadn’t given them a second look, but she was sure she would have remembered that little detail.
“I like to think it’s more a ‘silver’,” Keely offered helpfully. Then before the countess could slap her for being so helpful, she added quickly, “This is its natural color. I covered it to hide from the Inquisition. They’re here looking for the Grimm Truth, a very old text that…”
“I know what the Grimm Truth is,” Violet said curtly, waving a hand to hurry her on. “Why are they looking for it here, and why are they looking for it now, and what have you to do with it?”
“They’re following a trail left by someone calling herself ‘Lady A’. Sister Petra was working with her, convinced they’d find it here on the Wolf’s Tooth. I’m pretty sure that’s what got her killed, and the cathedral vandalism was just to cover someone’s tracks. I hope that the someone was associated with the Inquisition, or we’ve already got another player involved who’ll stop at nothing to get the book.”
“We can show you the letters we found in the chapel,” Elissa interjected.
“And there’s probably a workman still sprawled on the stairs halfway down,” Ulric added, because Keely’s explanation had already been interrupted, “who seems to have been involved, too. Going by what he babbled, he’s been searching the catacombs for ‘the book’. Drunk or insane or both. Got violent and forced me to deck him. Too big to shift up the stairs very far without help.”
“Oh, and the Inquisition thinks I’m a witch,” Keely finished helpfully. All set with a pithy reply for when Violet asked whether the Inquisition was right in that regard, Keely felt a vague sense of disappointment when the countess evinced not the slightest curiosity.
“So what you’re trying delicately to tell me,” Violet ventured instead, “is that Pontifine Augusta has charged my family on pain of death with keeping the two of you alive while all the forces of the Inquisition are trying to make you both considerably dead?”
“Pretty much,” Keely admitted. “Sorry.”
With no visible change in her expression, and still appraising Keely, Violet reached back in the general direction of Nolan. At first Keely thought she had moved to point to him for some reason, but t
he countess held her hand out expectantly with open palm.
“Your ladyship?” Nolan asked, as puzzled by the gesture as anyone.
“Nolan, what do you have on your person that you don’t think I know you have on your person,” Violet said, “but which you’d suppose I might find very useful just now?”
The man puzzled for a couple moments more, then light dawned in his eyes. Wordlessly, he dug in his tunic, produced a small metal flask, and dropped it into Violet’s waiting hand. She accepted it just as wordlessly, uncorked the container, and took a healthy swallow before re-sealing it and returning it to its owner.
“Thank you,” Violet said levelly before returning the full force of her attention to Keely. “So the Inquisition is here chasing a legend?”
“Yes.” Keely nodded.
“And you actually came here trying to find it first?” Violet asked.
“Yes.”
“And I should trust you about all this because…?”
“Damned if I know.” Keely shrugged. “But since you’re probably not ready to turn me over to the Inquisition anyway, I’m not actually invested in you believing any of it. You asked, I told.”
Violet bit her lip thoughtfully, in her first display of any emotion other than exhaustion.
“Oh, and the Inquisition thinks I’m a witch because I can turn into a cat,” Keely said. “Ulric’s seen it. Now if you think it’s worth the time, I’m willing to tell you the entire story. Otherwise, I’m just going to count on your sense of self-interest to keep us away from the Inquisition and alive, and be happy for it.”
“You’re certain the Inquisition is willing to kill over this book?” Violet stopped herself and made a face. “Of course they are. What I mean is, is it really important enough for them to interrupt all their other bits of killing and maiming to chase it across the kingdoms? And then…” She dug the heels of her hands wearily into her forehead. “I’m too tired for this.”
“Jane Carver personally threatened a miraculata with death for conspiring to find the book,” Elissa said. “We were there.”
Lethal Red Riding Hood (Dark Goddess Chronicles Book 1) Page 20
