City of Night

by Michelle West

Jewel stood and began to walk forward again; it helped that there wasn’t any other direction to walk in, because back was all Duster. “You know the part where I said it all looked clear from here on?”

  Duster swore. She was useful, that way.

  It took about half an hour to clear the rocks. In the last stretch, they did, in fact, have to crawl, but the crawling was easier because nearer the ground, the space was at its widest. Small slivers of stone that had probably never been disturbed lodged themselves in Jewel’s palms and knees, but Duster, flattened almost entirely against the ground, left off cursing for a bit to save breath. “I am not going back that way,” she said, in that tight voice that meant she was talking through her teeth. “So there’d better be another bloody way up.”

  Jewel, for once, had nothing to say.

  After Duster was no longer practically biting Jewel’s boots, neither did she.

  They emerged into a room. Into, in fact, what looked like a giant hall. The ceilings here had not been sheared off by the fall of stone and other buildings, and they rose and rose until their heights could only be glimpsed by almost falling over. Which Jewel did.

  Duster, who still had some dignity, put a hand out and caught her den leader’s shoulders before she toppled.

  The walls here were the color of dry earth. Cold, dry earth. They rose into arches that seemed to support the world. Jewel frowned, and then spoke a single word. The magelight in her hand guttered.

  But the halls could still be seen, and seen clearly.

  Jewel turned to look back the way they’d come. The rocks that had blocked the last of their passage were, like the walls of the hall itself, the same pale brown; she could not see past them or above them.

  “Jay?”

  “You can see, right?”

  Duster nodded. “Why are the rest of the walls standing?”

  “Funny, that’s what I was wondering.” She hesitated and then added, “we might end up crawling back out.”

  Duster grimaced, but understood: whatever it was that had preserved this hall didn’t extend to the rest of the undercity, and it was in the rest of the undercity that ways up were found. She shrugged, and took a step toward the nearest standing wall. “Where are the lights?”

  “I don’t know. Possibly in the ceiling.” It had to be magelight; it was too even, too regular, for anything else. That, and it was still shining.

  “Too bad. We could use a few.”

  It had been Jewel’s second or third thought as well. And even if they’d no personal need for them, they could easily sell a magestone. But the ceiling was never—ever—going to be accessible to anyone but a mage. Or a whole horde of men with scaffolds and ladders. She didn’t have access to the former, and Rath would slowly murder her if she tried to bring the latter here.

  But glancing at the floor, she saw grooves in stone, and although they were long and deep, they did, in fact, form letters. They were not, however, Weston letters of any vintage that Jewel recognized.

  “Jay?”

  Jay looked up.

  “Rope?”

  Jewel nodded, and they both untied their respective ends. Whatever had stopped the walls from being crushed had clearly preserved the floor; it was unlikely that they’d hit a crevice or thin stone here. Carver, on the other hand, had taken the empty pack. Jewel grimaced and coiled the rope, tying it into an awkward circle. She stuck her right arm through it, and tried to perch its mass over her shoulder. “Next time, remind me to bring parchment.” Rath had a bunch, and given the past week, she’d feel no guilt at all for borrowing some of it.

  Duster nodded.

  They were standing at what might have been the entrance, and the hall stretched out before them, not into darkness, but into the distance.

  “Do you think their Kings lived here?”

  “Or their gods,” Jewel replied, without thinking. Thought caught up with her, and it was a cold thought; she felt it settle uneasily around her body, and drew her shoulders in.

  “You think this was a temple?”

  Jewel didn’t answer.

  After a moment Duster shrugged; temple or palace, it didn’t matter to her. What did—what always did—was what, if anything, could be carried. In this case, the answer was: not much. Whatever they took would have to go back through the accidental passage created by the fall of large slabs of solid stone. Jewel watched her walk toward the wall on their right, and, shaking herself, she moved toward the wall on their left. Walking this way, they began to traverse the hall.

  The first thing they discovered as they walked were the faintly luminescent symbols engraved on the walls. They were identical on the left and the right, and they appeared in pairs. Jewel’s lack of parchment and coal frustrated her greatly, here. She knew damn well she wouldn’t remember them; they were too damn complicated. And she knew, when she told Rath, that he would want the information.

  Duster, on the other hand, was Duster. She had taken out her knife, and she was picking at the wall.

  “Duster!”

  “I think this is gold,” Duster said, without looking up. “In the grooves.”

  Jewel hesitated. What had Rath said? The dead wanted for nothing, needed nothing. She believed it, most times. They didn’t need bowls or scraps of rotten armor. They certainly didn’t need gold, if Duster were right. But . . . the rest of the undercity felt like an empty place. This hall, with its diffuse light, its intact ceilings, its standing walls, didn’t.

  Jewel walked over to where Duster was chiseling stone, and grimaced. It was, among other things, hellish on a knife edge if you weren’t careful.

  Duster glanced at her. “You going to stand there and watch me until we starve, or did you want to help?”

  Since starvation was not entirely theoretical at this point, Jewel brought the magestone out of her pocket and whispered the activation word. It glowed as she held its more focused light above the groove at which Duster was chipping.

  “I don’t think it’s gold,” she said.

  “If it is, it’s not coming off.” Duster sheathed her knife almost reluctantly, and unfolded. “This isn’t so bad,” she said, stretching her arms. “We could live here. It’d save us rent money.”

  “If we could find a way in that didn’t involve crawling.”

  “There’s got to be another way in. And out. And there’s got to be other stuff in this place that we can sell. C’mon.”

  Duster was pleased with the idea of moving the entire den here—but Duster had always liked the undercity; like Lander, she found its utter silence and endless night peaceful. Jewel, walking down the long hall and wondering if it would ever truly end, was less enthused. Mostly, she grunted, made a show of looking at the walls. It wasn’t entirely show; she would have liked to see a door or two open up, just to break the monotony.

  But she found the symbols disturbing. Duster didn’t seem to notice the difference between the symbols, but Jewel did, and some, inexplicably, made the hair on the back of her neck stand on end. Those, she didn’t touch. She didn’t let Duster touch them either, although that was harder; Duster was good if Jewel could say she had a feeling, but bad if she thought it was just superstition or fear.

  It was still very important to Duster to show no fear; always would be. She was sensitive, in her way—it just didn’t cause her to be any kinder. Jewel tried to sit on her growing unease. But Duster was Duster; she could tell.

  They reached the end of the hall, and stopped in front of a tall, narrow arch. It, like the hall, was stone, but the stone was gray to the previous pale brown; there was no door, but beyond the arch, the hall seemed to taper, losing, in that glimpse, some of its stark grandeur.

  “Jay?” Duster pointed.

  Jewel nodded. Studding the stone frame of simple arch were magestones. Five in all, three of which they couldn’t reach if they’d been standing on each other’s shoulders, and two of which were embedded at shoulder height. Well, at Duster’s shoulder. At first, they appeared to be gems, but t
he light they gave off was the same, in quality, if not brightness, as the light cast by the stone in Jewel’s hand.

  “I think they’re glass,” Jewel said.

  “For magestones? What a waste of glass.”

  Jewel nodded; it was. “They probably didn’t need to worry about the money,” she said dryly. “Just the looks. It’s not gold,” she added, “but if we can get them out, they’ll do.” She kept her voice even, on purpose, but it was hard. She was excited—and relieved—because it had occurred to both of them that anything large or bulky might be hard to actually get home.

  They set to work. Duster once again drew her knife, but she approached the magestone with care. It was larger than Jewel’s, and the glass was cut, like a gem, with a flat and eight distinct sides. Jewel drew her own knife, but she let Duster take the lead, let Duster try to use her blade as a lever.

  They worked in silence for a long time. Jewel was hungry and tired, but she was often hungry and tired, and if some of her attention wandered to home and bed, she could forgive that. Especially when the magestone finally popped out of its socket and into her hand. Duster gave a wordless shout of glee.

  And then the lights went out.

  “Shit.”

  Jewel carried her own magestone. The heavier glass one still glowed, but the hall was now as dark as the rest of the undercity. “Here,” she said, and handed Duster her stone. She whispered it into brightness, and the light increased—but only in the one stone.

  Which, damn it, made sense. This glass wasn’t crafted by a mage in Averalaan; who even knew how it worked? The thought had occurred to Duster as well, and probably at the same time.

  “There’s no damn way these stones were lighting the whole damn hall,” she said.

  “No. But there was probably some spell linking all the lights.”

  “That’s stupid.”

  Jewel nodded. It seemed stupid to her. Then again, whoever had designed these halls probably wasn’t thinking about the convenience—or lack thereof—to a couple of would-be thieves. “We’ve got this, and it’s still working. I think it’s good enough, for now.” She examined it as carefully as she could in the light of her magestone. It was clear glass, the edges still sharp, but at the base of the stone a single rune had been engraved.

  “You want to try to grab the other one?”

  Jewel hesitated, and then shook her head. “I want to try to crawl home for a couple of hours before Rath wakes up.”

  Duster shrugged, looked at the arch, and then stepped through it. When Jewel called her name, she stopped, but didn’t turn. “We might as well see where this goes; maybe there’s an exit closer to an actual street.”

  The hall through the arch did, as their glimpse of it implied it might, narrow signficantly; the ceilings were lower, although the walls that the light could easily reach curved upward at the heights. The heights themselves could be seen through a veil of darkness; Jewel whispered the light to its brightest output, which caused Duster, who was holding the stone, to curse in surprise. She dimmed it again, but didn’t apologize; Duster had very little patience with apologies, and when she was in a mood, they could be actively harmful.

  With the light dimmed, they started walking; Duster paused when the hall turned, slowly, to the right.

  “Floor?”

  “Solid.” She took a few steps forward, as if uncertain, and then repeated the word. Jewel saw her crest the bend, and followed. Because they always moved more slowly in the dark, she avoided running into Duster’s back, and only because of that.

  And she could see why: the hall, which inclined slightly up, ended at the mouth of what appeared to be a room, and the room was so brightly lit, the sun might have been directly above it in an absolutely cloudless sky.

  What darkness didn’t do, with Duster, light did. She hesitated. Jewel understood why; if they were anywhere near the surface, she was Queen Marieyan the Wise. Which meant magic. Which made her teeth ache, but only because she was grinding them. If she had been with anyone else, she would have said, Let me go first; with Duster, she couldn’t. But she could, in fact, take the lead without putting it into words; Duster would allow that.

  Duster was always going to be prickly. But if she was content to let Jewel quietly take the lead, and the possible risk, she was no more than three steps behind, and in the glow of magelight, the glint of her dagger was unmistakable when Jewel glanced back. Jewel smiled, because she recognized the knife. She kept that to herself.

  She couldn’t change the brightness of the stone in her hand, but as she approached the room, Jewel realized it didn’t matter. At its brightest, her stone would have been completely useless; the room was almost white with light, and painful to look at. But it was the pain of eyes acclimatized to shadow, and as her eyes teared, and they did, they grew accustomed enough to the light that she could ease them out of their defensive squint.

  Duster pulled up to her right, and stayed one step behind. Didn’t matter.

  This room was not empty.

  It had coffins in it. Or cenotaphs. Or whatever it was stone coffins with statues on top were called; Rath had told her, but the word fled, as words often did when she needed them.

  Duster whistled. “Fancy crypt,” she said softly.

  Jewel nodded, silent, as she stepped into the room.

  The room itself was large; certainly larger than the entire apartment the den now called home; it was also almost circular in shape. Reaching out carefully, Jewel touched one wall. It was almost white in color, but hints of smoky gray veined it. Marble, white marble. No bloody wonder the room’s light was so harsh. It couldn’t all be marble, could it?

  “Jay . . .”

  “Sorry.”

  There seemed to be three ways to enter, and she and Duster were standing at the mouth of one of them; the largest exit was girded by a plain, tall door, which rose to a peak. There was another exit, this one framed by cracked and broken stone; it led into the familiar darkness of the rest of the undercity. But the walls were otherwise unbroken, and they rose and curved into stellar vaulting above the center of the cenotaphs.

  The cenotaphs themselves were arranged like rectangular clover petals. There were three, each bearing the likeness of a body. The feet of those elegant, perfect bodies pointed in, their heads toward the walls. But they weren’t exactly men; they were taller than any man she had ever met. Even though the figures were lying on their backs, she could see height and majesty. Makers, she thought.

  “You think the maker-born made these?”

  Sometimes, the division between thinking and speaking wasn’t sharp enough. “I think they must have,” she told her den- kin. “Look at their hair. Look at their armor. I’ve never seen anything like the armor.” It was true. The armor was faintly blue, and gilded. They bore shields which obscured their breastplates, and they carried helms in their folded hands. Hair trailed the length of their bodies, like capes, and curled around their narrow, fine-boned faces.

  “Are they male or female?” Duster asked.

  Good question. Jewel couldn’t tell.

  She took a step forward and stopped. Around each of the standing stone coffins, circles had been engraved in the ground. Three concentric circles, and between each ring, writing caught light. But the circles were dark, and seemed to grow darker as she approached. She stopped walking and lifted a hand.

  But Duster, relaxed, had seen what she had seen, and Duster interpreted it differently. “That is gold,” she said. She passed Jewel, headed to the nearest circle, and knelt before it. The dagger hovered above gold runes, gold symbols, as Duster looked for a good place to start.

  “Duster, no!”

  The dagger touched, seemed to touch, floor, and Duster cried out, briefly, as the light flared to a searing, painful white. She was thrown across the room. Her dagger went flying and clattered, skipping like a stone, across the surface of marble floor.

  As it did, Jewel heard words. They were not words she understood, not clearly,
but they hit her the way a gong strikes a bell: she resonated with them. She would have raised her hands to her ears, for all the good it would have done, but Duster was half a room away, and might be injured. So she ran instead, while the syllables underscored her frantic steps.

  But she remembered the words. They were not the only words she would take from this place, but she would not repeat them to anyone save Rath, and even to Rath, only a few at a time, until she could make sense of them without alarming him.

  Jewel ran over to where Duster had fallen; Duster was already slowly gaining her feet. She was too surprised to swear. Much. And stunned enough to wordlessly take Jewel’s offered hand.

  “Okay,” she said. “No gold.”

  “I think,” Jewel replied, “no room. I don’t like the feel of this place.”

  “You couldn’t have said that before?”

  Jewel grimaced. “Let’s just stay by the walls and see if we can get out.”

  Duster nodded, and then looked down at her empty hand. She cursed. Jewel, looking down at it as well, saw a white mark across her palm and the skin between thumb and forefinger.

  “Duster, wait—”

  Duster didn’t answer. Instead, she headed back into the room’s center.

  “Duster, what are you doing?”

  “I’m getting my knife,” Duster snapped, without a backward glance.

  “No, forget the damn knife; you can have mine. Duster!”

  Duster froze for a second; her feet were at the edge of the circle that enclosed one coffin. Jewel managed to catch up, and she could see, resting against the farthest corner of the bier, the flat surface of naked blade.

  She wanted to leave this place.

  But Duster said, quietly, “I am not leaving without that knife.” It was a stubborn quiet. An implacable quiet.

  Gods damn it all, Jewel thought, furious with herself. She knew exactly why Duster wasn’t willing to leave the knife, and she knew that Duster would never admit it. She tried to say, Leave it, we’ll buy you another one, but she couldn’t force the words from between her clenched jaws.