“Speaker of falsehoods,” he repeated, and it almost made her smile. “I only wished to draw you here.”
“Arran Swindler, they should call you,” she replied, but did not seem angry. “You told me that your luck had run out. But there seems to be enough left.”
“Enough for her,” Arran said, nodding towards Megrithe’s prone form. “Not for me.”
“We’ll see. I will not accept your bargain, Arran Swinn,” she said, drawing herself up as his fading heart sank. “However, I will take the woman away. The price of her life will be between me and her when she awakes.”
“But –”
“Silence,” she snapped, loosening her grip on the flow of time just long enough for the Siheldi’s pain to sear though his thoughts for a sickening tick of the clock, instantly stopping his breath and the words that had hoped to ride it. “I am not finished. I will not accept your bargain,” she said again, leaning close to him, “because I want to see what you will do.”
“What does that –” he started, but her meaning became clear when he felt the leather-wrapped hilt of a dagger pressed into his hand. He looked down, but it was not a weapon forged of red iron. It was ordinary steel, cold and gleaming, beautiful and useless. “What is this for?”
“That is up to you,” she said, pressing her wintry lips against his cheek as she relinquished the blade to him. “Impress me,” she added softly as she straightened up.
The eallawif raised her hand, palm open towards the few drops of sunlight that had fought their way through the clouds. It took no more than a blink of Arran’s eyes for her to disappear, and with her went Megrithe, as absent as if she had never been there to begin with.
With her, too, went his protection from the Siheldi’s deathly touch, and there was no time to be glad that he had finally done something right before the sensation crushed down upon him again, paralyzing all thought.
He looked down at the knife in his hand and the glint of metal blurred into a hazy string of lights as a mist of tears came into his eyes. Self-murder would be the only way out, and she had known it. She had intended it – she was still angry with him. It would be the execution she wanted, but one for which she could claim clean hands.
He had to admit that it would be better that way. Clearly there had never been any hope of controlling the Siheldi, no matter what Bartolo said. The Siheldi was killing him easily. But if he killed himself first, he would be depriving the Siheldi of the satisfaction of his soul – of whatever it planned to use his soul to do – and that would be the best thing to do.
But did he have the courage to rip the air from his own lungs? To plunge the blade into a skin he had tried, for so many long, pointless years, to keep intact? He had faced death many a time, but it had always been at the hands of others. He had wanted it to be at the hands of the eallawif. Her retribution, not his sacrifice. A blood price. An act of mercy, even, but not his own choice.
He didn’t know why it mattered. Regardless of what had brought him there or who pushed him over, he was standing on the brink of hell. Surely the gods – gods he didn’t even believe in – intended him to descend into eternal torment in any case. The fact that he would be breaking yet another solemn commandment was irrelevant.
They had done this to him. They had done all of it. Exposed his father to torment and death – to a chosen death, he remembered with a stinging slice. Giles had been no coward, but that had not stopped him from siring a mistake. Arran hadn’t needed Bartolo to tell him that. His mother had always thought so. His father would have too, had he lived. A mistake too shameful to live and too craven to do anything about it.
“Fit only to die,” he whispered, echoing the eallawif’s words. And die he would. It had been little more than a minute since the Siheldi had claimed him, but in that time his strength and wits had dribbled away like melting snow, leaving the tips of his fingers frozen, dull to the sturdy weight of the dagger he cradled in shaking hands.
“I’m sorry, Mum,” he breathed, raising the blade as far as he could, desperate to hope only that she would never know what he had done. Piercing his heart in such a way would destroy hers – her fragile mind swaddled thickly in a faith that demanded his condemnation for such an act, regardless of the circumstances. He knew she would never fight that. He knew she would wish instead that he had never been born.
Forgive me, he thought just as his knees gave way, as he angled the point of the dagger upward to slip under his ribs as he collapsed onto the hard ground, squeezing his eyes shut as he braced himself for the last pain he would ever know. It hurt already. It would hurt forever. I’m sorry.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Bartolo bent close to the pane of glass and breathed on it, wiping away the mist from his lungs with the polishing cloth he usually used to deal with smudgy coins. It wouldn’t do to have anything impede his vision as he sat back to watch the performance he had been waiting for all his life.
To call it just a pane of glass was a gross misnomer, of course. It was a mirror, or rather a window, to the great chamber the neneckt called Sind Heofonne, the world-vault: the bridge between the terrible, burning realm of the Siheldi and the clean waters of Niheba. The neneckt hated to go there, and even Faidal had initially put up a bit of a fight when ordered to take the prisoners to the sacred place.
He still appeared rather uncomfortable, Bartolo thought, as the fog on the mirror spread outwards like a creeping frost. It eventually revealed Faidal standing outside the volcano’s entrance, leaning his head back against the boulder that blocked Arran and the Guild woman inside, and he was looking conflicted. Bartolo shook his head. It really was impossible to get good help.
The mirror was a clever bit of sea folk magic, gifted to Bartolo by Tiaraku himself to aid him in his work. It revealed everything under the water, even an uncloaked neneckt, and presented such a distinctly clear picture that Bartolo was sure he could feel the heat of fire on his face as he shifted his attention to the mountain’s main hall.
Megrithe and Arran were climbing down the chamber’s wall, strips of cloth wrapped around their hands. That was good. They were headed in the right direction. He just hoped the fumes wouldn’t get to them first.
He held out his empty goblet and wiggled it a little. Johan instantly stepped forward, lifted the lid that kept the liquid inside his serving vessel, and poured him more wine. It usually fascinated him, how the infinite mass of seawater that surrounded it didn’t dilute the drink, but his pair of sacrificial lambs were crossing the bridge over the swirling magma river, and the mechanics of his meal were pushed entirely out of his mind as he felt his stomach tighten in sympathetic anxiety as the woman wobbled slightly before taking another step.
“Not now,” he snapped as his servant scooped more olives onto his plate, briefly obstructing his view of Arran following over the chasm. It was so very much better than watching even the most exciting play. In just a few moments, they would encounter the echoing spirit of the Queen of all Siheldi, the secret prisoner of the sea.
There had been a war endless ages ago, Bartolo had been told, which had split the two houses asunder. The Siheldi had killed countless thousands of their neneckt cousins, but once the Queen and her consorts had fallen to those who could utilize the daytime to fight their cause, a bargain was struck.
The Siheldi had stopped hunting the neneckt, and Tiaraku’s forbearers had kept the Queen in cautious but comfortable custody, feeding her occasionally on the souls of sailors snatched from the raging waves of hurricane seas, destined to drown anyway.
The neneckt had certainly benefited from the arrangement, over hundreds of generations of uneasy peace, and the kings of the ocean had wrapped themselves in the surety that the Siheldi had forgotten the taste of the salt of their blood. But now that the gemstones had been recovered, there would be a new arrangement. In just a few moments, everything would change.
Bartolo smiled and clapped his hands as the ground began to shake and tremble in his looking glass, th
en grimaced and wiped his fingers on the tablecloth. He had been unknowingly picking at the olives, and they were covered in oil and brine that was now splattered on his shirt. Johan would have a hell of a job to do cleaning up the greasy mess. It didn’t matter. The time had arrived.
He couldn’t hear the voice of the Queen as Arran and Megrithe cowered with their hands over their ears, but he could hear their side of the conversation, and his grin only widened when Megrithe started to scream.
“Go on,” he whispered as she fell to the ground, the tangerine glow that suffused the cavern doing nothing to hide the paleness in her face as the spirit devoured her. “Just a little more. We’re so close.”
Johan actually dropped a plate in surprise when Bartolo jumped out of his chair and screamed his frustration a second later, but the soft shattering of the porcelain barely registered to his furious ears as the Siheldi abandoned Megrithe before finishing the job. The servant hastily left the room entirely when Bartolo suddenly froze, his nose just an inch from the mirror, as if moving closer would help him understand what exactly was going on.
There was something in the chamber that shouldn’t be there, and Arran was talking to it. Bent nearly double as he tried to brace himself against the Queen’s attack, the smuggler showed no sign of pain or misery as the slightest of flickering of a pale light surrounded him like a dome of exquisitely thin glass. There was something there. Someone. A neneckt?
For an instant, Bartolo flicked his attention to the exterior of the mountain again, expecting to see Faidal waiting at the entrance like they had agreed he would. He wasn’t there. But could he have made his way to Arran so quickly? Maybe, but that wasn’t the problem. It was someone else.
“No,” Bartolo whispered when the echo of light disappeared, revealing the blade in Arran’s hand. The only being that could smuggle such a thing past the vigilance of the Siheldi was an eallawif. “That traitorous bitch.”
Small and remote, entirely inaccessible through the thick, smooth glass, Arran took a deep breath and mouthed a word Bartolo couldn’t hear. The Queen didn’t even seem to know what was happening as he fell forward, the gleam of the knife’s blade disappearing as it pierced his flesh. The Siheldi released him, threw him from her as she shrieked in anger and dismay, and he curled into a ball around the wound, a quick shudder running through him before he lay still.
Bartolo was livid. Not just livid. Now he was scared. The entire plan had hinged on appealing to Arran’s sense of self-preservation and his greed – all men like him had greed. All men like him wanted to live, or they would have stopped trying long ago.
Bartolo had promised the Siheldi Queen that she could have Arran’s blood, although she didn’t know that it was to seal her fate as Tiaraku’s slave, not to nourish her and strengthen her for her escape. He had promised the Siheldi a lot of things – everything he hadn’t already promised to Tiaraku first.
With Arran’s last breath dissipating before the Queen could take it in, Bartolo had no more leverage. All the rare coins in the world couldn’t equal Swinn’s value to his ultimate plot. Perhaps he hadn’t sufficiently impressed upon Arran what his true worth was. He hadn’t wanted to give his prisoner the upper hand, but it seemed like he had made a fatal mistake.
It didn’t matter now, though. Swinn was dead, and Bartolo would be next if he couldn’t find another way to satisfy the powers that owned him.
“Johan!” he shouted, keeping one eye on the mirror and the other on the doorway as he waited for his wayward servant. He should never have left the room, and Bartolo was in quite enough of a mood to make him seriously regret his lapse in etiquette when he had the leisure. “We’re leaving,” he said when the man reappeared, looking properly apprehensive.
A movement caught from the corner of his eye made him turn back to the pane of glass. It was Faidal.
Of course he had gone back to the cavern, Bartolo thought disgustedly. The sea devils couldn’t be trusted an inch.
“What is he doing?” Bartolo wondered aloud as he sat down again, his chin in his hand, his anger temporarily forgotten. Faidal had stooped over Arran’s corpse and placed something in his mouth, holding his nose until he swallowed. Bartolo burst into a smile as he saw the muscles moving in his Arran’s throat as his reflexes forced him to comply. He was alive. Maybe just barely, but he was still alive. There was still a chance.
But the Queen of the Siheldi could see that, too, and she wasn’t about to give up her prize to the neneckt crouching by the wounded man’s side. The knife had found its way into Faidal’s hand, but there was nothing to slash at. There was nothing to reason with, either, though Faidal tried his best. He still couldn’t hear the Queen’s conversation, but he did hear Faidal pleading for his life.
Bartolo wasn’t sure what to make of it when the neneckt stopped talking, cocking his head as if he was listening to a lengthy reply, then slowly nodded. Faidal picked up Arran’s unconscious form and slung him over one shoulder, carrying him as easily as a summer coat as he walked without hesitation towards the cauldron of molten fire.
Johan gasped along with his master as Faidal threw Arran’s body into the flames. Without the slightest hesitation, he jumped in after. The viscous liquid swallowed them both immediately with little more than a small, popping hiss. There was no evidence of the horrible, scorching death they both should have faced from such an action. There was no evidence at all. They were simply gone.
“Pack my things,” Bartolo told Johan, failing to keep the uncertainty out of his voice. How could flesh and bone survive such a thing? How could a man and a neneckt descend into the unknown kingdom of the Siheldi? There was a barrier there – it had been there for millennia, keeping the Queen imprisoned under the bedrock. He wondered if anyone else knew that she could allow objects to enter her kingdom.
Bartolo leaned closer to try to see if he had missed the ash and cinders that should have been all that was left of Swinn and Faidal, but his scrutiny was cut short with a strangled shout as the Queen’s invisible form rushed towards him with the unstoppable momentum of a charging bull, shattering the glass as she shrieked like she had lost her only love.
Bartolo shot out of his chair and hid behind it as the pieces of the mirror fell to the ground, completely shaken by the impossible sound. He put a hand to his chin and stared blankly at the bead of blood that a flying shard had drawn from his skin. She couldn’t know that he had been watching. Tiaraku had said no one could know.
The thought of the neneckt king made him wonder what he was going to say when he next stood in front of the empty throne, all his plans undone and his schemes completely shattered. The stones were gone, back into the possession of the Siheldi, along with their keeper. The pact had not been completed, and now the terrors of the night had everything they needed to free the Queen from her prison without any restraints at all.
It didn’t take any great powers of deduction to realize that once unbound, her first target would be her jailors. The neneckt would never survive the onslaught. Niheba would fall, and with it would crumble Bartolo’s dreams. He had made a very big mistake.
“Never mind about the packing,” he said to Johan as he scooped up the gold and silver still lying out on his table, shoving the money into his pockets, heedless of the damage he might be inflicting to the rare and ancient faces that stared accusingly at him from their precious, carven tombs. “I think we ought to be leaving right now.”
***
Megrithe didn’t know what exactly she expected to find when she opened her eyes, but a warm and comfortable bed in a guest room of the Guild House in Paderborn certainly wasn’t it.
She remembered everything. The watery world of Emyer-Ekvori, Bartolo’s cold words, and the terror of the mountain under the sea. Arran’s steady hand as he tried to hide his own trepidation. His smirk at her ill-fitting dress. His pleading for her life with something she could not see. Where was he? Had he gotten her out? Had she been unconscious all the way from Niheba?
&n
bsp; Maybe so, she thought, groaning as she tried to sit up too quickly, leaving her head spinning and her stomach sloshing with disapproving bile. She certainly felt ill enough to have slept for a week. But he wasn’t there when she finally succeeded in levering herself upright, grasping at the clean, crisp linen as if it would steady the spiraling waltz of purple specks that swarmed her sight. He wasn’t there. But she was.
“Mistress?” she asked, confused by the eallawif’s presence, rubbing at her eyes to try to clear her vision. “Have I done something wrong?”
“Not yet,” the eallawif said, standing at the foot of the bed and looking slightly out of place – no, slightly transparent, as if she was unused to such surroundings and refused to commit the entirety of her spirit to the unfamiliar space. “I have saved your life.”
“What? How?”
“Through your very clever friend,” she replied. “Very sharp, and so very sad. He thought he was giving his life for you.”
“No,” she said, shaking her head. “No, that’s not – that’s not fair. I didn’t ask for that. He can’t do that. I won’t let him.”
“You asked him to do what was required. And he has.”
“Take me back there,” she said urgently, swinging her legs over the edge of the bed and trying to stand up. “Oh,” she gasped a moment later, looking up at the impassive eallawif from a heap on the floor.
“You need rest,” she said, making no motion to help Megrithe as she struggled back to her feet.
“He’s dead? Arran is dead?” she asked, feeling her throat tighten with a grief she did not typically extend to strangers. She barely knew him. She had barely known him. Two days ago she would have had him hanged without a second thought, standing by the scaffold with her chin raised in triumph as his eyes bulged and his feet twitched. It would have been right. It would have been justice. But two days ago, he hadn’t pushed her out of the way of Faidal’s fists. He hadn’t taken the Siheldi upon himself to save her. Two days ago, he hadn’t died for her.
Dark the Night Descending (The Paderborn Chronicles Book 1) Page 22
