“Yes,” she whispered. “It’s me—Bethany.”
The armlet sent her a feeling of warmth, of something close to friendship. Bethany could feel the heat in her arms and legs, as if she’d just crawled from a warm bath. She smiled, and sent the armlet back a jumble of feelings—the way she felt when Dormael ruffled her hair, the way she felt when Shawna fixed it, the feeling of laughter at one of Allen’s jokes, or of accomplishment under D’Jenn’s tutelage.
The armlet sang back.
Their enemies crawled over the deck of the ship, like ants over a rotting corpse. Men and metal and sweat and lightning, cries of anger and pain. The skies boiled, the seas churned. Their enemies would win unless they went up together and burned them from the ship. Immolate them, set them aflame, BURN EVERYTHING IN SIGHT.
“Stop it!” Bethany hissed into the hum of magical energy. The sight of the man in the tunnels, his hand reaching for help, filled her mind. She heard his screams again, and she shut them away somewhere dark, banishing them from her mind. “Just…stop.”
Surprisingly, the armlet complied. Its song fell to a dull hum, the insistence gone from it. It sang something low, something she could understand.
Come.
Biting her lip in trepidation, Bethany followed the song of the armlet down the curving hallway. She wasn’t sure what would happen once she found it, but she knew one thing—wherever it was, there was probably someone there who could help her.
Letting the fiega guide her, she set off toward the heart of the strange magical spell.
**
“You know I can’t let you down there,” Jarek said. “The deacon would have both our arses over a spit for that, Dormael.”
Jarek Suriah was a hulking beast of a man, wide-shouldered and grim-faced. He was a Mal, and bore tattoos in swirling geometric patterns that wound over every inch of his arms, which were thicker than many trees that Dormael had seen. He stood fully three hands taller than Dormael, and scowled down at the swords that Shawna wore on her belt. Shawna repaid his attention with a bored, feline gaze.
Jarek was one of Dormael’s own generation. They had trained together as Warlocks, and had completed their training as part of the same small group. Jarek Suriah looked like a tavern brawler, but he had a sharp mind, and a strong sense of justice. Like all people from Tasha-Mal, Jarek could be prickly about things like honor and blood-debts.
“It’s nothing about a child, though,” Mataez said from beside him. “It’s a body, Dormael—a grown man by the looks of him. Burnt to cinders down in the Rat Holes.” Jarek turned his scowl down on Mataez, which the shorter man waved off with a scowl of his own. “The deacon didn’t mean to keep the information a secret from one of ours, Jarek. Dormael’s a Warlock, too. Remove the stick from your arse, brother.”
Mataez was another member of their class, and of a height with Dormael. He was a Runemian, with short, mud-colored hair not unlike Dormael’s own. Mataez was a bit thicker through the shoulders and waist than Dormael, but was quicker than he looked. The man had the odd talent of being able to remember everything he read with a startling amount of accuracy. His mind was like a steel trap.
The two of them stood guarding the entrance to the Rat Holes, maintaining a ward between them that closed the doorway off from intrusion, or inspection. Behind them, the entranceway was nothing but an undulating dark surface.
“When did this happen?” Dormael asked, dread pooling in the pit of his stomach.
“Sometime between now and the afternoon,” Mataez shrugged. “The deacon hasn’t come up from his inspection yet, but the rumor is that one of the staff found it when she went down to check after the screaming.”
“Do they know to whom the body belongs?” Shawna asked. Jarek raised an eyebrow at her, but Mataez nudged him in the side. Jarek gave Mataez an evil look, and cleared his throat. It sounded like boulders rubbing together.
“We don’t know anything yet,” Jarek said. “From what we’ve heard, though, it would be hard to tell.”
“First murder I can remember in the Conclave,” Mataez said, shaking his head.
“You believe it was murder?” Shawna asked.
“What do you think happened? Somebody tripped and fell on a candle, then managed to burn to death in the middle of a stone hallway?” Mataez said. “Of course it was murder, and done with magic.”
Shawna gave Mataez an evil look, to which the man replied by holding up his hands for peace.
“I can’t remember that ever happening,” Jarek rumbled. “A wizard murdering someone on the Conclave grounds. They’ll be talking about it for a hundred years.”
“I’ll bet the Initiates already have a trove of rumors,” Mataez said. “Remember when we were children? We used to start them for fun.”
“I remember,” Dormael smiled. His mind, though, could focus on nothing but Bethany. “Listen, brothers—It’s important that I speak to the deacon. I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t about my daughter—you’ve met her, right?”
“Aye,” Mataez grumbled, looking away. Jarek gave Dormael a narrow look.
“I need to get down there. You know I’m not going to mess anything up. Victus won’t mind you letting me through—you know that,” Dormael said. His reasons had nothing to do with Victus, but if he painted them that way, maybe the boys would let him pass. “You know I wouldn’t ask if I wasn’t worried for her safety.”
Mataez and Jarek shared an uncomfortable look.
“Better to ask forgiveness,” Mataez shrugged. Jarek just shook his head and looked away. Mataez turned back to Dormael and took a deep breath.
“Fine,” Mataez sighed. “If he catches you, though, it’s on you. I don’t want another tour at the Southern Bastion anytime soon. Nothing but scorpions, sand, and Mals to keep you company. Dreadful.”
“You know how hard I can hit,” Jarek sighed, “yet you still say things like that.”
“I didn’t mean you, of course—you’re one of the good ones,” Mataez smiled. “It’s your women I was talking about. Mean as the underworld, dry as the desert. Nothing good about them.”
“Thanks, brothers. I won’t forget this,” Dormael said.
Just as Mataez and Jarek stepped aside and dropped their ward, however, Victus appeared on the stairs. He noticed Dormael standing between the two men he’d left to guard the entrance, and narrowed his eyes at the three of them. Mataez and Jarek acted completely natural.
“Dormael,” Victus said, “I’ve been looking for you all day, boy. Come on—there’s something you need to see.”
With that, Victus turned and descended once again into the darkened tunnels. Dormael shared a look with Shawna, shrugged at his two fellow Warlocks, and stepped after Victus. Shawna followed him close behind. He had hoped to avoid Victus until he could talk to D’Jenn about the details of what he had discovered, but there was no helping it now.
Now he had to lie to the man who had taught him to lie.
“I imagine the boys filled you in?” Victus’s voice echoed from further down the stairs.
“Aye, at least what they knew,” Dormael replied. “A body, burnt to a crisp, as Mataez put it.”
Dormael came to the bottom of the landing, where Victus waited. The man’s Kai hummed into the tunnels, evoking a magical light. There were usually candles on this level, but Dormael couldn’t spot any pools of light. Shawna came down the steps and fell in beside him, eyeing Victus with caution. If Victus minded her presence, he said nothing of it.
“A body, indeed,” Victus said. “There’s something you need to see, though.”
“Something I need to see?” Dormael asked, the dread in his stomach deepening.
“Just follow me, I’ll show you,” Victus nodded.
Dormael shared a concerned look with Shawna as Victus strode away, then turned to follow the deacon into the tunnels. He led them down twisting corridors, and then down another staircase to some of the lower levels. Shawna gave Dormael a questioning look, but he waved her off. He
didn’t want to reveal anything to Victus that he didn’t have to, and silence was always better than active subterfuge for hiding things.
Victus stopped walking, and signaled for Dormael to do the same.
“This is where it starts,” the deacon said, motioning Dormael forward. “Have a look, boy. Let’s see if you’re still sharp enough to pass muster, eh?”
“I passed muster a long time ago, Deacon. Watch me.”
He couldn’t help but feel a pang in his guts as the smile came to his face. He trusted D’Jenn, but part of his heart was rebelling against the idea that Victus was a traitor. The smirk on the deacon’s face was proud, even as the light in his eyes was calculating. Try as Dormael might, he couldn’t see an enemy when he looked at the man. Taking a deep breath, he shoved his feelings into the back of his mind, and focused on the task at hand.
First, he opened his Kai and filled the hallway with light.
The thing that first caught his eye was the fact that the doors had been pushed open. There were three doors on each side of this particular hallway, and each had been pushed open and left ajar. Tiny footprints in the dust marked where someone—a child, by the look of the prints—had walked to each door and looked inside. Dormael walked further down the tunnel, following the prints as they meandered past each room. Victus and Shawna had stopped some distance behind him, Victus gesturing for her to give Dormael some space. The little prints continued down the hallway and around the corner.
Dormael felt ice form in his chest, and tried to keep his breathing steady.
Mataez said the body was a grown man.
He repeated that thought over and over again in his mind. Some part of him knew that Victus would never set him up to discover Bethany’s body, even if the man was a traitor. Still, seeing her footprints in the dust—and there was no doubt in him that the prints were hers—made him feel a spike of terror he couldn’t hold down.
“Dormael,” Victus called from where he and Shawna stood. “Are you alright, boy?”
Dormael realized he’d been standing still, staring at one of the prints.
“Fine,” he said, “just taking it all in.” He kept his back to them. A fine sheen of sweat had broken out over his forehead, and he didn’t want Victus to see it. Mastering his emotions, he followed the prints around the corner.
The smell hit him as soon as he rounded it.
Burnt corpses had a stink to them that, once known, was never forgotten. Dormael’s first time catching the scent had been outside a small village in Neleka after the Galanian invasion. A major battle had been fought in a field nearby, and the residents knew that their options were either leaving the bodies to rot in the sun, or burning them. The smell hadn’t come out of Dormael’s clothes for days. It was the sort of scent that straightened the spine.
Dormael felt his hackles rise as the familiar stink hit his nose. As his magical light filled the tunnel beyond, he spotted the body. It was lying on the stone near the intersection of a few tunnels, one crispy arm reaching to the ceiling. A sconce was driven into the wall above it—one of a few along the wall—but it was warped, drooping as if the metal had grown soft with heat.
Dormael forced his gorge down as it tried to rise.
He followed the prints up to the body, and past it. In fact, the body sat at an intersection, and the prints went down each tunnel where the heat hadn’t scorched everything away. Unless the girl had skipped past the burning man over and over again, she must have come here before the burnt man—or woman, he supposed. Mataez was right—it was hard to tell.
Upon closer examination, though, Dormael started to feel certain the body was male. Men always had wider shoulders and more narrow hips, and this person had been tall. There were no features left in the scorched hunk of flesh that lay on the stone, but Dormael could see teeth through a hole frozen into a rictus on its face. He shuddered, thinking of the pain.
Why lay there? Why lay on the stone while you’re burning? What were you reaching for?
Dormael looked at the way the body was positioned, and realized something. He hadn’t been reaching for the ceiling, he’d been reaching outward—toward an intersection further down the tunnel. He’d been reaching out in supplication to someone.
Dormael felt a chill run down his spine.
You were begging for your life.
Dormael turned a sharp look backward, and caught Victus’s grim expression. It was obvious what had happened here to both of them, but Victus had made sure that Dormael saw it with his own eyes. A rock dropped into his stomach as the two of them regarded each other.
The man—whomever he had been—had been held down and burned to death.
Dormael turned back to the burned remains and made his way to where the other person in this situation had been standing. He wasn’t sure what he expected, but part of him knew that he would find something terrible. Dormael braced himself.
At the distant intersection, he found something odd. A pair of footprints had been left in the stone, but not in the dust. Two perfect, dainty outlines of bare feet were apparent in the stone, and everything else for about eight hands in all directions was cracked with millions of tiny fractures, as if a great amount of pressure had been put on the rock. Dormael knelt and touched his hand to it, sinking his senses out into the ether.
He could feel Bethany’s magic, still undulating in the tunnel like an angry mist.
“I needed you to see this for yourself,” Victus said from where the body lay. “I needed you to be here, to be a part of this. We need to find her, boy. We need to know what happened here.”
The bastard had known already—but Dormael resisted the urge to be angry.
He knew Victus was right.
“Bethany doesn’t know how to use magic this way,” Dormael said, rising to his feet. “This was wild, unfocused. I know you can tell.”
“Bethany did this?” Shawna asked, surprise warring with disgust on her face.
“She didn’t mean to do this—that’s what I’m saying!” Dormael snapped.
Shawna held her hands up in surrender, and Dormael gave her an apologetic look.
“I can tell that her magic was wild, but that doesn’t say anything about her intent,” Victus said.
“Deacon—I’m telling you, she wouldn’t have done this without a good reason.”
“All I’m saying is that we don’t know what happened here,” Victus said. “The man could have been following her, could have been trying to hurt her. Also, maybe he just startled her, scared her and something went terribly wrong. Maybe it got away from her, boy—you know how strong the girl is.”
“That’s not what happened here,” Dormael growled. “Look at the damned footprints! She’d been all over this hall, up and down the tunnels, looking in the doors as she came through. Her prints run in all directions, so this man was following her.” Dormael cast about on the ground, intensifying his magical light. Another set of prints, marred with haste, continued down the hallway in the opposite direction of the body. Dormael pointed them out. “See? She ran from him, off in this direction. I’m telling you, Bethany must have been defending herself.”
“Just because she came here first doesn’t mean he was following her,” Victus said. “You’re letting your emotions get in the way of your judgment, boy. Don’t look at me that way, gods-dammit—you know I’m right. All we know right now as that the girl is scared, she’s alone…and she’s dangerous.”
“Bethany is not dangerous,” Dormael said, but even as he did, he remembered her burning every Galanian on board the Seacutter to dust. The words tasted bitter in his mouth, and bile rose in his throat. Dormael couldn’t tell the deacon the real reason he knew that Bethany wasn’t to blame—that he himself had been kidnapped off the streets of Ishamael only hours before.
He was terrified for Bethany.
“Regardless, we need to find her,” Victus said. “We need to find her before anyone else gets hurt—including her.”
Dormael nodde
d, and Victus walked past him, following the prints down the hallway. Dormael let out a long breath and fell in beside Shawna as they followed Victus. She elbowed him, and signed to him in the Hunter’s Tongue.
What does this mean?, she asked.
Bethany is in trouble, he signed back. That’s all I know. She couldn’t have managed that sort of magic on purpose. She was scared, she was defending herself on instinct.
What happens when we find her?
I don’t know, Dormael replied. But I do know one thing.
What?
We can’t let anyone hurt her. I don’t know what Victus wants, and I don’t trust him.
I just hope Bethany is alright.
Me too, he said. Me too.
Dormael was so frightened for the girl that he could feel his hands shaking. His stomach felt like emptying itself, and his chest felt like exploding. It felt like the whole world should be on fire with his concern, but the hallway was full of eerie silence. The only sounds were their echoing footsteps as the three of them followed Bethany’s trail deeper into the tunnels under the Conclave.
**
Bethany drifted down the hallway, following the rivers of pulsing magic through the gloom. She no longer needed for her Kai to sing to the brass runes—the tunnel was alive with power. There was no need for her to see. Her magical senses guided her every step, and the armlet coaxed her along.
There was something nearby, some great, pulsing heartbeat that vibrated every vein in her body. She could feel each beat of the thing, pulling at her, jarring her teeth with in a steady, humming rhythm. Even as she glided along the floor, something pulled at her magic, leaching a bit of it into the whirlpool that spun at the center of that pulsing heartbeat. Bethany was drawn to it like a moth to flame.
Come.
The alien song walked with her, singing to her in warm tones. It showed her images—stars spinning in a sea of blackness, flame climbing a wall of struggling men, a woman made of nothing but warm smiles and terrible fire. It beckoned.
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